NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 6GB 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.

Right off the bat, we see NVIDIA’s latest GeForce take the lead over AMD’s latest Radeon. While I’d expect to see the GTX 1060 show a bit of a gain over the RX 480, the performance deltas with Battlefield 4 are simply huge.

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.

NVIDIA’s GTX 1060 continues to dominate AMD’s RX 480, although the difference with Crysis 3 isn’t quite as stark as it was with BF 4. Both cards offer an ideal experience at 1080p, but neither can at 1440p, until detail levels are tweaked.

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.

It doesn’t look like DOOM is going to save the RX 480 from being pummeled, but all things considered, both offer about the same level of performance. The GTX 1060 did notably push beyond 60 FPS at 1440p, though, which is quite impressive given the sweet graphics featured in the game.