In-Gaming benchmarks
As always, the Synthetic benchmarks are great and all, but I really want to know how well the cards are going to perform in game. That’s why we buy them right? Well with 11 different games being tested (plus the two games tested twice for both versions of DirectX) it can get a little crazy to read, so I do like to condense all of our testing down into two graphs to break down the overall playability. This breaks the results down into below 30 FPS that I consider to be unplayable, over 30 FPS but less than 60 that is playable but not ideal, and then everything over 60 FPS is perfectly playable. I do this for both 1080p and 1440p resolutions.
At 1080p the GTX 1060 had 9 games fall into the 60+ FPS range and three in the 30 FPS range. This is great and shows that nearly every game you throw at it at 1080p it is going to chew through at the highest possible settings. There are a few games that you will need to tweak things slightly or live with the playable but not great 30-59 FPS range. For comparison to the RX480 8GB it had 9 over 60, 2 over 30, and 1 under 30, so the GTX 1060 does seem to provide a slightly better 1080p experience.
At 1440p the GTX 1060 starts to struggle a little. Here it has 4 games in the green and 9 in the 30 to 60 FPS yellow range. The RX480 in the same tests has 6 in the green, 5 in the yellow, and two in the red. The slightly higher VRAM and memory bus seem to help at 1440p for the RX480 but the GTX 1060 performs better in Ashes of the Singularity at 1440p by just enough to push it up above 30 FPS.
We of course still have all of the individual results as well if you are interested in looking at them. So how does the GTX 1060 compare to the GTX 980? Well, it seems to be very dependent on the game. For every game, the GTX 1060 performs faster the GTX 980 pulls ahead in another game. The same can be said about the RX480 as well. In games like Hitman, the RX480 pulled ahead but GTX 1060 outperformed in nearly all of the older games like Bioshock and Sleeping Dogs, especially at 1080p. The games tested in both DX11 and DX12 don’t really give as clear of a picture as I would like. In Ashes of the Singularity, the GTX 1060 outperforms the RX480 by a large amount in DX11 but in DX12 the RX480 does come back up, but they ended up with the same average FPS in DX12. In Hitman 2016 the GTX 1060 is behind the RX480 in both tests but the RX480 does get a 10 FPS bump when testing in DX12. So the RX480 is benefiting in DX12 but it’s not always enough to pull ahead of the GTX 1060. Of course, we don’t currently have any Vulkan based games in our test suite, but we have seen AMD really benefit in those games due to their mantle code being a part of Vulkan, plus their higher asynchronous compute performance.
