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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Mikuni - Saturday, August 6, 2016 - link
Avidemux works pretty well.onemoar@gmail.com - Saturday, August 6, 2016 - link
here is my luxmark scoreoverclocked EVGA GTX 1060SC
http://www.luxmark.info/node/2919
Mustalainen - Saturday, August 6, 2016 - link
I think i have commented once or twice on any article here but just had to do it again. The people in the comment section are just out right arrogant. You expect the reviewer to provide the detailed reviews on the same day a product is released? Can you guys cut the guys at Anandtech some slack? I bet they do their best in order to provide us with these reviews (which by the way are free). If you are not happy with the quality of the article, go somewhere else (but i bet you always come back here just because these guys do a great job). So what if the review is lagging with a month or two, if you are such an enthusiast go and buy the card/device yourself.fanofanand - Saturday, August 6, 2016 - link
They would receive their samples weeks ahead of time. How do you think so many day 1 reviews get posted?Sushisamurai - Saturday, August 6, 2016 - link
there is some truth to @fanofanand, but that's assuming anandtech also gets their review samples ahead of time as well - which you really can't prove. Those assumptions can be toxic.Mustalainen - Sunday, August 7, 2016 - link
So assuming this is not the authors full time job they should try to rush the review for the release date? And as stated in the other comment, you can only assume they get review samples ahead of time? There are so many day 1 reviews from other sources because when they have receive the review sample the review is about reading the technical details on the box (and test 5-10 different games and report the fps if its a gpu). Do you want Anandtech to become such an site?yannigr2 - Saturday, August 6, 2016 - link
This review makes GTX 1060 look much better than RX 480, compared to other reviews. Just an observation.MarkieGcolor - Saturday, August 6, 2016 - link
Agreed. AMD really needs to release their high end. I wonder if they are in cahoots with Nvidia. Why wouldn't they release a card that can beat titan x when they totally could? With this new process both companies are holding backsilverblue - Sunday, August 7, 2016 - link
Vega isn't ready yet, that's why they've not done it.Jman13 - Tuesday, August 9, 2016 - link
That's because they ignored a lot of things where the 480 is better: such as DX12 on RotTR, where the 480 pulls essentially even with the 1060. The games list also ignores Doom, which is a HUGE win for the 480, and is included in most other review sites games suites. I understand the difficulty in altering and adding games to the suite, but I do think the discussion could have focused on the fact that there is a split between these two cards depending on which APIs are used. The 1060 is clearly the better card in DX 11 games. The 480 has generally performed very well in DX 12 games, being even in some and notably better in others. The only Vulkan game, Doom, shows a HUGE lead for the RX 480, but who knows how representative that is at this point.Long term, the 480 will probably be the faster card for newer games that use DX12, while the 1060 will be faster for most current and older games, as well as several newer games for the next year.