NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 Review: Pascal Value And Performance Per Watt

Name: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060
Brand: NVIDIA

by Marco Chiappetta — Tuesday, July 19, 2016, 09:00 AM EDT

Shadow of Mordor And Thief Performance

Monolith’s surprisingly fun Orc-slaying title Middle Earth: Shadow of Mordor, delivers a ton of visual fidelity even at the lowest quality settings. So, to maximize the eye-candy on these high-end graphics cards, we ran the game’s Ultra quality benchmark routine at a couple of resolutions, topping out at 4K--excuse us, 3840x2160 for the sticklers out there.

All of the game's graphics-related options were enabled, along with FXAA and Camera Blur...

Middle Earth: Shadow of Mordor Performance

Glorious Orc-Slaying Vengeance

Middle-Earth: Shadow of Mordor

The performance trend we've seen up to this point changed a bit once we fired up Shadow of Mordor. Here, the Radeon R9 390 was able to pull ahead of the GTX 1060 at both resolutions. The new GeForce is faster than the Radeon RX 480 by about 10%, however.

There were some notable frametime variations on the GeForces here, but the framerates are high enough that the variations are not perceptible in real-world gameplay. The Radeon RX 480's output was significantly more uniform, though.

Thief

DirectX 11 Gaming Performance

Square Enix set the tone for Thief by saying, "Garrett, the Master Thief, steps out of the shadows into the City. In this treacherous place, where the Baron’s Watch spreads a rising tide of fear and oppression, his skills are the only things he can trust. Even the most cautious citizens and their best-guarded possessions are not safe from his reach."

The Thief series has been popular for years, not only for its interesting story lines and unique gameplay, but because the games have consistently featured excellent graphics and imagery and leveraged bleeding edge technology, like AMD's Mantle API, for example.

thief screenshot
Thief

thief1 2

thief 2 2

Score one for the Radeon RX 480. At 1440p, the 8GB and 4GB Radeon RX 480 cards sandwich the GeForce GTX 1060. With the resolution cranked up to 4K though, the Radeons pull ahead.

Although the cards performed somewhat differently, they behaved similarly in terms of frame time variation -- at least in the beginning of the test. Towards the end, things smoothed out much more on the Radeon.