The GeForce GTX 1060 Founders Edition & ASUS Strix GTX 1060 Review
by Ryan Smith on August 5, 2016 2:00 PM ESTThe Division
The final first person shooter in our benchmark suite, The Division is a online-only game powered by Ubisoft’s Snowdrop engine. The game’s design focuses on detailed urban environments and utilizes dynamic global illumination for parts of its lighting. For our testing we use the game’s built-in benchmark, which cycles through a number of scenes/areas of the game.
For whatever reason, the GTX 980 has always hit above its weight in The Division, and as a result this is the one game where the GTX 1060 can’t stay at parity with the one-time NVIDIA flagship. In fact this is another case where the GTX 1060 can’t quite muster 60fps at 1080p, falling just short at 58.9fps. However the ASUS card does get to do what the reference card cannot, with its factory overclock adding another 7% to the total.
Meanwhile compared to the AMD competition, this is the second instance of GTX 1060 and RX 480 coming in virtually tied. At both 1440p and 1080p the cards are off by less than 1fps, so while GTX 1060 is typically comfortably ahead of AMD’s best, that’s not always the case.
Finally, compared to the GTX 960 we’re looking at a 73% performance gain. Past that, the generational gains get especially large; by the time we’re looking at GTX 660, GTX 1060 delivers more than 3x the performance.
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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.