ASUS GeForce GTX 1060 6GB Strix Graphics Card Review

Battlefield 4

Thanks to the fact that DICE cares more about PC gaming than most developers, the Battlefield series continues to give us titles that are well-worth benchmarking. While Battlefield 4 is growing a little long in the tooth, it’s still a great test at high resolutions. Once Battlefield 1 drops, we’re sure to replace BF4.

Testing: The game’s Singapore level is chosen for testing, as it provides a lot of action that can greatly affect the framerate. The saved game we use starts us off on an airboat that we must steer towards shore, at which point a huge firefight commences. After the accompanying tank gets past a hump in the middle of the beach, the test is stopped.

Just as we’d expect, the ASUS Strix edition GTX 1060 is a bit faster than the Founders Edition. Given the close frame rates in both games, I’d wager that no one would notice the difference between the two cards, but we’d of course always recommend going with the option that is going to give the best performance overall. A huge gain might not be seen here, but it could be in other titles… such as Crysis 3?

Crysis 3

Like Battlefield 4, Crysis 3 is getting a little up there in years. Fortunately, though, that doesn’t matter, because the game is still more intensive than most current titles. Even though the game came out in 2013, if you’re able to equip Very High settings at your resolution of choice, you’re in a great spot.

Testing: The game’s Red Star Rising level is chosen for benchmarking here, with the lowest difficulty level chosen (dying during a benchmarking run is a little infuriating!) The level starts us out in a broken-down building and leads us down to a river, where we need to activate an alien device. Once this is done, the player is run back underneath a nearby roof, at which point the benchmark ends.

With Crysis 3, you can begin to see why we called the GTX 1060 a “Great” card for 1080p gaming on the first page of this review. Here, the frame rates were undeniably great, but can we still say that about forthcoming games? There’s not a ton of leeway before we begin seeing sub-60 FPS performance. At 1440p, the card still performs admirably, but the settings would have to be dropped quite significantly to deliver that 60 FPS we seek so bad.

DOOM

DOOM 3 was released a couple of months before Techgage launched (March 1, 2005, for the record), and it was a game featured in our GPU testing right from the get-go. For this reason, this latest DOOM feels a bit special, even though it follows DOOM 3 up eleven years later. As we hoped, the game proves to be more than suitable for GPU benchmarking.

Testing: Due to time constraints, an ideal level could not be chosen for benchmarking. Instead, our test location starts us off at the bottom of a short set of stairs early on in the game, where we must climb them, open up a door, and then go to a big room where demons are taken care of and the benchmark is stopped.

DOOM is no problem for the GTX 1060 at 1080p, or even 1440p, considering 60 FPS can still be hit. That’s at High detail, to boot. It’s like this card was made for this game.