The GeForce GTX 1060 Founders Edition & ASUS Strix GTX 1060 Review
by Ryan Smith on August 5, 2016 2:00 PM ESTRise of the Tomb Raider
Starting things off in our benchmark suite is the built-in benchmark for Rise of the Tomb Raider, the latest iteration in the long-running action-adventure gaming series. One of the unique aspects of this benchmark is that it’s actually the average of 4 sub-benchmarks that fly through different environments, which keeps the benchmark from being too weighted towards a GPU’s performance characteristics under any one scene.
NVIDIA promised GTX 980-like performance for the GTX 1060, and this is more or less where they’ve landed under Tomb Raider. The otherwise stock clocked GTX 1060FE underperforms GTX 980 by only a frame or two, delivering about 97% of the performance, while the factory overclocked ASUS card makes up the difference and takes the lead. Or to compare things to the next tier up, GTX 1060 is delivering about 72% of GTX 1070’s performance for about 65% of the price.
Meanwhile the performance gains over the past generation GTX x60 cards are remarkable. Whereas GTX 960 struggled to break out of the 30s on framerate, GTX 1060 just cracks 80fps. This is 215% of GTX 960’s performance, more than doubling its predecessor. Some of this I don’t doubt comes down to memory – our GTX 960 is the more common 2GB variety – but it also goes to show once again how 2GB cards are now VRAM limited under modern games. And the performance gains are even greater if we go back to 2013’s GTX 760 or 2012’s GTX 660. GTX 960’s one disappointment was that it didn’t make as much progress over GTX 760 as everyone would like, but GTX 1060 more than makes up for this.
As for the AMD competition, things shape up about as you’d expect. In our look at RX 480 we found that it delivered GTX 970-like performance, while GTX 1060 is slated to deliver GTX 980-like performance. As a result we see the GTX 1060 lead by around 15% at both resolutions for Tomb Raider.
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DominionSeraph - Friday, August 5, 2016 - link
Aw, look at the fanboy complain that it isn't "fair" because they didn't only present AMD's strengths and Nvidia's weaknesses, but instead used tests representative of the gaming landscape.beck2050 - Monday, August 8, 2016 - link
Nvidia has driver teams as well. Plus 22% with the latest Dx12 Hitman. 1060 will compete very well. Cooler faster less energy, and priced accordingly.eddman - Saturday, August 6, 2016 - link
So much misinformation still going around. Gameworks effects are either CPU only, which have ZERO effect on the GPU, no matter the brand, like waveworks in just casue 3, or are GPU based, which can be DISABLED, like witcher 3's hairworks or HBAO+, or RotTR's HBAO+ and VXAO.Ryan Smith - Friday, August 5, 2016 - link
The benchmark suite was finalized back in May, when the DX12 version of Tomb Raider was rubbish. I talk a bit more about this in another comment, but basically we only periodically update the benchmark suite due to the amount of work involved and the need to maintain a consistent dataset for Bench. The plan is to do another update in September.Colin1497 - Saturday, August 6, 2016 - link
I understood that situation. Last thing you needed was to change the games when you were running behind. Just commenting on the change in the landscape over 2 months. Doom and Vulcan is obviously another thing. Looking forward to what you do next.Simplex - Sunday, August 7, 2016 - link
It's "Vulkan", not "Vulcan".MarkieGcolor - Friday, August 5, 2016 - link
Please include 4k, and crossfire/sli setups in your benchmarks. Otherwise I do not care about this late review.xenol - Friday, August 5, 2016 - link
4K seems kind of pointless, we all know it's going to be sub 40FPS which few people are going to recommend this card for 4K gaming.Also what's the point of SLI on a card that doesn't support it?
AnnonymousCoward - Friday, August 5, 2016 - link
If 4K is pointless then so are most of the 2560 tests which use ultra settings and produce <60fps.4K with medium settings, no AA would be much more interesting to me.
MarkieGcolor - Saturday, August 6, 2016 - link
True. I'm just saying it would be interesting.I understand that if you want 1060 sli you should just buy 1080, but I feel Nvidia disabled sli to keep the second hand market at bay and sell more new expensive cards.