The GeForce GTX 1060 Founders Edition & ASUS Strix GTX 1060 Review
by Ryan Smith on August 5, 2016 2:00 PM ESTThe Witcher 3
The third game in CD Projekt RED’s expansive RPG series, The Witcher 3 is our RPG benchmark of choice. Utilizing the company’s in-house engine, REDengine 3, The Witcher makes use of an array of DirectX 11 features, all of which combine to make the game both stunning and surprisingly GPU-intensive. Our benchmark is based on an action-heavy in-engine cutscene early in the game, and Hairworks is disabled.
In terms of absolute performance, I’m a bit surprised that the GTX 1060 can’t crack 60fps at 1080p. 57.6 isn’t too far off the mark, but for what’s otherwise meant to be NVIDIA’s ultimate 1080p gaming card, it’s not quite ultimate enough to hit 60fps on a year-old game.
In any case this does put GTX 1060 a bit farther behind the GTX 980 than usual, delivering around 94% of its high-end predecessor’s performance. Or to compare the card to GTX 960, it nets a 75% performance gain. Otherwise this also happens to be a game where the GTX 1060/1070 gap is a smidge larger than usual, with GTX 1060 delivering 70% of GTX 1070’s performance.
Finally, as for the RX 480 comparison, GTX 1060 is yet again solidly in the lead. Here we see it deliver 12-15% more performance than the 8GB RX 480, depending on the resolution.
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Wall Street - Friday, August 5, 2016 - link
Yeah, it is amazing how many times the text "$249" appears in this review of a $299 card and a $314 card. Ryan is fully feeding into nVidia's price anchoring. I think that if the price chart shows $249 for the GTX 1060, then it should also show $299, because the $249 cards are nowhere to be found and explicitly not the ones he looked at.Ryan Smith - Friday, August 5, 2016 - link
The entire Founders Edition things makes reviewing a bit more complicated. But since it's purely a stock card from a performance perspective, it's a very reasonable proxy for the $249 cards. No GTX 1070 is going to under perform the 1060FE, because that's the minimum specs allowed to begin with.Wall Street - Saturday, August 6, 2016 - link
With Turbo Boost, I am not 100% sure that the single fan Zotac or EVGA 1060s which are the actual $249 cards will maintain the same clocks as the founders edition will.Samus - Sunday, August 7, 2016 - link
What's depressing (for me anyway) is this card consistently outperforms my 970 in the games I play...and my 970 cost substantially more just a year ago. It's pretty unusual for a mainstream card to overtake an enthusiast card in one generation.Death666Angel - Sunday, August 7, 2016 - link
Well, this was a full node shrink (no half node) and a much more advanced process (FinFET), so unfortunately, it was very likely. However, you've had a good year of great performance out of your 970, so not too much to complain about there. :DSamus - Monday, August 8, 2016 - link
True. The 970 will hold tight until I eventually graduate from 1920x1200 to 2560x1600.spbx - Friday, August 5, 2016 - link
after anand left thing weren't the same :(BrokenCrayons - Friday, August 5, 2016 - link
So true! There was a huge decline in the use of capital letters and punctuation by readers in the comments section.Cygni - Friday, August 5, 2016 - link
Yeah, the influx of the same terrible negativity posters from other websites has really been annoying lately.Morawka - Friday, August 5, 2016 - link
That's what popularity and the reddit crowd will bring.