NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 review: Performance for the masses

Performance Benchmarks - Part 2

Ashes of the Singularity

Note: We were unable to get Ashes of the Singularity to run in DirectX 12 mode and Crazy settings for the GeForce GTX 960 and 1060, which is why those figures are missing.

We’ll focus on what DirectX 12 performance figures we managed to obtain here, seeing as the previous games were all DirectX 11 titles. As it turns out, the Radeon RX 480 turned out a better performance in DirectX 12 mode, even though it was slower than the GeForce GTX 1060 in DirectX 11 mode. At 1600p and High settings, the Radeon RX 480 was around 7 percent faster.

The card also didn’t show much improvement when moving from DirectX 11 to 12. Even the GeForce GTX 1070 and 1080 had comparatively moderate improvements compared to AMD cards like the Radeon R9 Fury, so it would look like AMD’s implementation of asynchronous compute capabilities is still favored in AotS, despite any official statements to the contrary. At 1080p and High settings, the GeForce GTX 1080 enjoyed a 19 percent boost in DirectX 12, whereas the Radeon RX 480 netted a 33 percent increase.

Hitman

Note: As with Ashes of the Singularity, Hitman couldn’t run in DirectX 12 with all the graphics options maxed out on the GeForce GTX 1060.

As in AotS, there was virtually no difference in performance when moving from DirectX 11 to 12 for the GeForce GTX 1060. From the numbers we managed to obtained, it looks like the newest Pascal card doesn’t quite have the computing heft to reap a significant performance boost, even if it does support the new features in DirectX 12. That aside, performance was still very respectable for a US$299 card, and it could even handle the game at 1600p and Ultra settings.

With that said, performance was a mixed bag when the GeForce GTX 1060 was compared against other cards. At 1080p and Ultra settings, the GeForce GTX 980 was still 17 percent faster. The Radeon RX 480 also had a particularly strong showing, where it edged out even the latter card and was around 23 percent quicker than the 1060.

And given that the RX 480 is outperforming the GeForce GTX 980 even at the higher resolutions, and given the especially poor performance of the GeForce GTX 960 with just 2GB of memory, it looks like the Polaris’ card 256GB/s of memory bandwidth is serving it well. Hitman appears to be more demanding in this aspect of performance, and that would explain why the GeForce GTX 1060 lagged behind the RX 480, which it has shown that it can beat.

Temperature and Power Consumption

There’s nothing much to remark on when it comes to the temperature and power consumption figures. With a TDP of just 120 watts, the GeForce GTX 1060 expectedly ran cooler and consumed less power than its more powerful counterparts.

It’s worth noting that its TDP is actually lower than the Radeon RX 480’s 150 watt TDP, and the latter card also ran hotter at 70 degrees Celsius.

Overclocking

We managed to overclock the GeForce GTX 1060 to a high of 1,756MHz (or 120MHz above its base clock), which translates to a boost clock of 1,948MHz. With that said, the card still managed to boost even higher to around 2,126MHz in 3DMark, so that amounts to quite a significant speed jump.

This resulted in around a 7 percent improvement in Fire Strike, which was on par with the gains the Radeon RX 480 produced when we overclocked it. The biggest gain was actually seen in Fire Strike Ultra, where there was close to a 10 percent improvement.

As it turns out, the proportional performance increases from overclocking are also similar to what we observed with the GeForce GTX 1070 and 1080, and in that respect, the card doesn’t fare too shabbily at all.