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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fanofanand - Saturday, August 6, 2016 - link
You keep saying that but there are no 1060s that can be bought for $249. MSRP is meaningless when none sell at that price.eddman - Saturday, August 6, 2016 - link
...and you keep at it as if it isn't the same with 480s. I just looked for 8GB 480s on newegg. All out-of-stock except for one model that is going for $400!!!I suppose you've never heard of shortages. There are $250 1060s. They simply sell as soon as they get restocked.
Dr. Swag - Friday, August 5, 2016 - link
Any word on the progress of the rx 480 review? I haven't seen any good dives on the Polaris architecture so I'm really stoked on your review!Ryan Smith - Friday, August 5, 2016 - link
I want to do a bit more on the Polaris architecture, but it will have to wait until after RX 470 and RX 460.Dr. Swag - Friday, August 5, 2016 - link
Ah OK. Thanks for the response!xenol - Friday, August 5, 2016 - link
Anyone else chuckle at the heatsinks past the fan that apparently aren't attached to anything?DanNeely - Friday, August 5, 2016 - link
Yeah those stubs are cosmetic; but there's not much to them either.Tom's has a detailed teardown of the cooler. A few ornamental fins on the front edge with the entire actual heatsink between the blower and case exhaust holes. The 1080's is about the same.
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/nvidia-geforce...
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/nvidia-geforce...
tipoo - Friday, August 5, 2016 - link
Pretty funny, main heatsink comes off and that little heatsink nub remains. Maybe it manipulates airflow to the fan, at most? Or, more likely, it's just cosmetic to make this look like a bigger GPU.Mr Perfect - Friday, August 5, 2016 - link
When you inevitably do a custom card round up, could you please get some blower style fully exhausting cards in there? It would be immensely helpful for the SFF crowd who can't stuff a tipple fan behemoth in the case, much less dump 120 watts of heat in there. Off hand, Asus has the Turbo, Gainward has one and Galax has another.fanofanand - Friday, August 5, 2016 - link
When was the last time Anandtech did a custom card roundup? They don't really do that sort of thing anymore.