The GeForce GTX 1060 Founders Edition & ASUS Strix GTX 1060 Review
by Ryan Smith on August 5, 2016 2:00 PM ESTGrand Theft Auto V
The latest edition of Rockstar’s venerable series of open world action games, Grand Theft Auto V was originally released to the last-gen consoles back in 2013. However thanks to a rather significant facelift for the current-gen consoles and PCs, along with the ability to greatly turn up rendering distances and add other features like MSAA and more realistic shadows, the end result is a game that is still among the most stressful of our benchmarks when all of its features are turned up. Furthermore, in a move rather uncharacteristic of most open world action games, Grand Theft Auto also includes a very comprehensive benchmark mode, giving us a great chance to look into the performance of an open world action game.
On a quick note about settings, as Grand Theft Auto V doesn't have pre-defined settings tiers, I want to quickly note what settings we're using. For "Very High" quality we have all of the primary graphics settings turned up to their highest setting, with the exception of grass, which is at its own very high setting. Meanwhile 4x MSAA is enabled for direct views and reflections. This setting also involves turning on some of the advanced redering features - the game's long shadows, high resolution shadows, and high definition flight streaming - but it not increasing the view distance any further.
Otherwise for "High" quality we take the same basic settings but turn off all MSAA, which significantly reduces the GPU rendering and VRAM requirements.
While more often than not GTX 1060 trails GTX 980 by a couple of percent, in GTAV the tables get turned. Now GTX 1060 has the lead, albeit a trivial 1-2%. The net result is that much like its last-generation predecessor, GTX 1060 can deliver framerates in the mid-40s at 1440p, but you need to go to 1080p to average better than 60fps.
Meanwhile compared to GTX 960 we’re looking at another case where more VRAM and GPU performance improvements combine to make GTX 1060 punch above its weight. Here the new NVIDIA card outperforms the last-generation x60 card by 93%. Otherwise compared to the more powerful GTX 1070, we’re looking at about 73% of that card’s performance.
Finally, this is another game where the GTX 1060 compares very favorably to the RX 480. Here NVIDIA leads by 30%.
Shifting gears to 99th percentile framerates, the story is much the same as with the averages. GTX 1060 retains a comfortable lead over the competition and in the process stays above 30fps, even at 1440p.
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anandreader106 - Friday, August 5, 2016 - link
First thought: Still no Doom benchmarks being factored in?Ryan,
You are my favorite GPU reviewer. Period. However I do think I need clarity on your Final Words.
It's my opinion that DirectX 11 performance is "good enough" from Nvidia and AMD thus far in this new generation. So I'm left wondering, why aren't you going more in-depth with DirectX 12 and Vulcan titles/performance? Wouldn't that give us the best indication of what to expect going forward?
cknobman - Friday, August 5, 2016 - link
The best indication you will get is that when reviewing Nvidia cards none of these things will be addressed?Why, because Nvidia is not doing so hot at them and it would not make their cards look better than AMD's.
Look at the other 1060 benchmarks and comparisons and you will see that:
A. Nvidia is behind on dx12 and the 480 => 1060
B. @1080p the 1060 is overkill and a $200 480 4gb (or even a $180 470) is all you need
C. Because of Nvidia's "founders edition" price gouge model most 3rd parties are trying to get away with charging more than $250. Reality is most 1060's are >= $270 which makes the AMD 480 the better buy.
StrangerGuy - Friday, August 5, 2016 - link
It's funny the AMD fanboys always harp about the evil $300 1060 and never mentions how their favorite $200 480 is essentially vaporware and 8GB versions price gouged to death.Ryan Smith - Friday, August 5, 2016 - link
"It's my opinion that DirectX 11 performance is "good enough" from Nvidia and AMD thus far in this new generation. So I'm left wondering, why aren't you going more in-depth with DirectX 12 and Vulcan titles/performance? Wouldn't that give us the best indication of what to expect going forward?"The benchmark suite only gets updated periodically. It's a lot of effort to design and validate a testing sequence, and then run (and possibly re-run) 30 some-odd cards through it. So adding games has the net effect of slowing things down even further.
At this point we're updating the testbed to Broadwell next month, at which point we'll refresh the games list as necessary.
Though I will note that there's a reason we run so many (9) games: one game is too small of a sample size. Right now Doom is the only Vulkan game on the market,* so while it's a very interesting first look at Vulkan, it's not something that's going to be representative of Vulkan as a whole.
* We'll ignore DOTA 2 since it's not meaningfully GPU limited on these fast cards
CHADBOGA - Friday, August 5, 2016 - link
Doom is one of those few games out there that will inspire people to go one way or the other and should be included in your benchmark suite.Scali - Saturday, August 6, 2016 - link
Aside from that, the Vulkan implementation in DOOM is not yet complete.As you can read in the DOOM FAQ, they use AMD shader intrinsics extensions, but no equivalent for nVidia. Likewise, on AMD hardware, async compute is enabled, on nVidia it is not yet. The FAQ says they're still working on optimizing the code with nVidia.
While it may be interesting to benchmark DOOM's Vulkan implementation to get an idea of where we currently stand, I don't think it is mature enough at this point to say anything about performance in Vulkan games in general, or how AMD and nVidia stack up, since you're comparing apples to oranges at this point.
rhysiam - Friday, August 5, 2016 - link
I too am curious as to why the whole DX11 vs 12 comparison wasn't even raised. DX12 does not appear once in the conclusion page. The 1060 is the better DX11 card, no question. It's early days for DX12, but what we're seeing so far is enough to suggest things may well be quite different. The three DX12 titles in the review (Hitman, RoTR & AoS) are the three strongest games for the 480 by far. Add Doom via Vulkan into the mix and you have 4 NextGen API titles that put the 480 at or above 1060 performance. Of course we can't make hard and fast recommendations based on a few titles like this, but surely it's worth mentioning at least, if not exploring in detail?This might be a minor point except for the fact that you dismiss the 4GB 480 based on speculation/extrapolation that its VRAM won't be enough to keep it competitive future demanding titles. Surely those demanding titles will increasingly be (or at least offer) DX12 though? So if you're advocating a 1060 over the 480 4GB based on longevity and future performance, the DX12 question has to be raised doesn't it?
rj030485 - Friday, August 5, 2016 - link
Think Ryan needs to work on his math. He says the 1060 is 17% faster than the 480 in GTA V when the difference more like 30%.Ryan Smith - Friday, August 5, 2016 - link
Oh geeze. This is what happens when you read the wrong column in a spreadsheet. Thanks!onemoar@gmail.com - Friday, August 5, 2016 - link
I don't know why anands witcher 3 scores are so lowI am pushing 80FPS in places with everything turned up to ultra and post effects on with no hairworks