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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thkg - Friday, August 5, 2016 - link
Well the price landscape is not all accurate.The cheapest 1060 you can buy right now cost $299 (the FE model).
You right now can buy a RX 480 8G from newegg for $239 (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N8...
Ryan Smith - Friday, August 5, 2016 - link
The pricing situation is complex at best, and frustrating at worst. At various times when I wrote this article $249 GTX 1060s and $239 RX 480s went in and out of stock. At the moment it was published, all 480s were out of stock and $249 and $279 1060s were in stock.The article is written with the best general advice I can give, which is based on the idea that manufacturers are frequently restocking the MSRP parts. But since things fly off the shelves so quickly, there's no real consistency day to day. (Or even hour to hour; that 480 is out of stock already). Ultimately you can get a $249 1060 about as easily as you can get a $239 480, which is to say not very (and it's not as if higher priced cards are usually any more available).
eddman - Saturday, August 6, 2016 - link
Really?!! Do you know what shortage is? I clicked on that link and it said... not available.There ARE 1060s at $250 already. They are just hard to get.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N8...
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N8...
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N8...
eddman - Saturday, August 6, 2016 - link
Wrong link for the second one. This is it:http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N8...
eddman - Saturday, August 6, 2016 - link
It seems my brain isn't cooperating. Those links are correct. This is the additional link:http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N8...
Fnnoobee - Friday, August 5, 2016 - link
Really, Anandtech? Date of this review is Aug. 15 and yet you're using Nvidia's latest driver but AMD Crimson 16.7.1? Really?! I could see if you published this around July 19 (you know, when the card actually hit shelves), but 16.7.2, which fixed the power draw and thermal issues on RX 480 and increased performance overall across the board, released July 7, almost a month ago! 16.7.3 released July 29, which other than providing bug fixes added a significant 10 percent performance boost for RoTR which you benchmarked. I could see if you were ignorant of these releases but you even published an article on your site on July 29. I knew right away before even looking at the details of your test set up when I saw your benchmarks on RoTR, because they're far lower than numbers I've consistently achieved on the benchmark at the same settings you have on my RX 480 at stock clocks (OC I achieved about 6-7 percent more). If you can't be bothered to properly update your tests to the latest drivers and software for both product lines so ALL products get a fair shake, why even bother reviewing or comparing a product in the first place? It smacks of laziness and not being very fair and objective.Ryan Smith - Friday, August 5, 2016 - link
Thanks. 16.7.1 is actually a typo. All testing was done against 16.7.2 for the RX 480.As for 16.7.3, this came out much too late to be included in this review (since it takes longer than a week to produce). However I will need to go back and update the RX 480 results for that driver build for the forthcoming 470/460 reviews.
bill44 - Friday, August 5, 2016 - link
Before I read it, does it mention audio and supported audio sampling rates?@Ryan Smith
I know.........not at hand.......blah, blah.
No one knows, it's not on the spec sheet, not in reviews, nowhere to be found.
Ryan Smith - Friday, August 5, 2016 - link
I don't have that information or a means to test it. But was there a specific sampling rate you're looking for?bill44 - Saturday, August 6, 2016 - link
Thank Ryan.Yes please, 88.2KHz and 176.4KHz. Likelihood is that the other sampling rates will be supported.