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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Flunk - Friday, August 5, 2016 - link
It doesn't seem like any of the large tech sites were sampled GTX Titan Xs. All the reviews I've seen are from small sites, most of which I've never heard of before. Maybe they're just borrowing retail cards from owners.fanofanand - Friday, August 5, 2016 - link
I read that Nvidia wasn't sampling Titan X's to any publications. It's possible that those smaller sites are run by hobbyists who bought the card themselves.jabbadap - Friday, August 5, 2016 - link
Just wondering are you doing those great in depth HTPC oriented graphics card comparisons in future.HideOut - Friday, August 5, 2016 - link
Or see review for the S7 since its just the same stuff.Psyside - Saturday, August 6, 2016 - link
Please do NOT let Joshua Ho review ANY Samsung product anymore!fanofanand - Saturday, August 6, 2016 - link
I agree with this, his reviews read like advertisement for Apple.rtho782 - Sunday, August 7, 2016 - link
And the 960! We're missing the immediate predecessor to this for comparison...Ballist1x - Monday, August 15, 2016 - link
What the review is missing is that the GTX 1060 is actually a replacement in pricepoint to the GTX 970 and therefore has only increased performance by 10-20% in the space of 2 years for the same price.The GTX 960 is a different price segment completely and therefore is not such a direct comaprison.
nathanddrews - Friday, August 5, 2016 - link
Too bad the $249 MSRP models aren't available anywhere. This is essentially marketed as a 960 replacement, but priced like a 970 replacement IRL.Cygni - Friday, August 5, 2016 - link
Cards at $249 have been in stock off and on with Newegg since launch. They may not be available right this exact second, but you shouldn't be waiting too long for stock at MSRP, as the article talks about.