The GeForce GTX 1060 Founders Edition & ASUS Strix GTX 1060 Review
by Ryan Smith on August 5, 2016 2:00 PM ESTCrysis 3
Still one of our most punishing benchmarks 3 years later, Crysis 3 needs no introduction. Crytek’s DX11 masterpiece, Crysis 3’s Very High settings still punish even the best of video cards, never mind the rest. Along with its high performance requirements, Crysis 3 is a rather balanced game in terms of power consumption and vendor optimizations. As a result it can give us a good look at how our video cards stack up on average, and later on in this article how power consumption plays out.
Whereas Battlefield 4 was rather forgiving to the GTX 1060 at even 1440p, Crysis 3 is the opposite. While over 30fps, 42fps leaves a long way to go before hitting the all-important 60fps fluidity mark for this FPS. At 1080p on the other hand it has no trouble sustaining over 60fps. This does, however, end up being one of the only games where GTX 1060 isn’t neck-and-neck with GTX 980. Even the factory overclocked ASUS card is a bit off of GTX 980, though it’s still 4% ahead of the stock GTX 1060.
Compared to the GTX 1070 then, the GTX 1060 delivers fairly typical performance at 73% of its faster sibling. Versus GTX 960 this is a 71% performance gain, which is actually the smallest performance gain we’ll see throughout our entire benchmark suite. On which note, looking farther down the charts we have to compare GTX 1060 against GTX 660 to find a better than 2x performance increase.
Finally, against the RX 480, GTX 1060 once again delivers a 14% performance gain versus its closest competition.
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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.