Synthetic Benchmarks

Before diving into my testing of the GTX 1060 I did take a little time to break out our GTX 980 reference card and run it through all of our updated benchmarks. To be completely fair to the RX480 I also retested it using the newly introduced Catalyst 16.7.1 drivers. To start off the testing I ran the 1060 through our synthetic benchmark suite. This now also includes 3DMarks Time Sky benchmark that takes a look at DX12 performance. In 3DMark Fire Strike the GTX 1060 came in 300 points below the GTX 980 and 500 points above the RX480 in the 1080p Performance benchmark. The Extreme and Ultra tests were similar as well. In Time Spy both the GTX 1060 and RX480 pulled ahead of the GTX 980 by a considerable amount but the GTX 1060 came in slightly above the RX480 with a score of 4023 compared to the 3982 of the RX480 8GB.

The next benchmark was the Unigine Valley Benchmark 1.0. Here the GTX 1060 pulled a respectable 65 FPS average. The GTX 980 performed a little better with 66.6 FPS average and the RX480 fell way behind with a 52.1 average FPS.

In Catzilla I wanted to take a look at how the GTX 1060 would handle the Furmark like fur on the cats while running at a variety of resolutions including 4k. Here the GTX 1060 pulled way ahead of the RX480 but still struggled to match the performance of the GTX 980, especially in the 1080p testing.

The last synthetic benchmark was a quick run through of the SteamVR benchmark. This isn’t a detailed benchmark but it does give us a quick 1-11 rating that helps give us an idea of what kind of performance we can expect from the GTX 1060 in VR. I’m looking forward to expanding our VR testing in the future. Here the GTX 1060 pulled ahead of the GTX 980 with a flat 8 to the 980’s 7.8. The RX480 8GB was still in the green but down at 6.9 points. We can see a big gap when going up to the GTX 1070 and GTX 1080 as well as the GTX 980 Ti but the mainstream cards are still falling in the green as well making them a good entry level card for VR.