This is also one of the best showings for the RX 480 relative to the R9 390, where the improved geometry engine in Polaris appears to help quite a bit.In terms of frame rates, Ashes (at our selected settings) is the most demanding game in our test suite, with only three cards breaking the 60 fps mark at 1080p. It’s dominated by three DisplayPort connectors, which are version 1.2-compatible. That depends largely on what you're currently running and whether you're unhappy with the performance it offers. We'll take a closer look at what this means in terms of load distribution across the rails on the next page. If the results in Ashes were surprising, The Division is basically the reverse of those. This is why we don't read too much into any single result. What they are willing to do is offer a lower performance part at a better price, and that's what the GTX 1060 does.Much like the other Pascal GPUs, GTX 1060 is able to increase clock speeds relative to the previous generation by a healthy margin—30 to 45 percent compared to the GTX 960, to be precise. We saw this happen with the Maxwell GTX 900 series over time, where initial parity with the existing Kepler GTX 700 series cards eventually ended up being a relatively large performance advantage for Maxwell.And there's still the dual-GPU question; I typically advise going with a single faster GPU if possible, and only suggest SLI/CF once you're near the top (GTX 1070 or R9 Fury or above, basically), but if you're thinking you might want to add a second GPU down the road, GTX 1060 doesn't support SLI. $284.99. That means much of the work Nvidia pours into its drivers is circumvented.Remove the four screws securing the cooler's body and it comes right off. The differences between boards don't end there, though. Notice the lack of an SLI connector up top?
RX 480 beats the 1060 by just over 10 percent here, so it's by no means a landslide victory, and with 480 prices still higher than expected it's more of a wash right now. This is a relatively narrow range which indicates that the Nvidia GTX 1060-6GB performs reasonably consistently under varying real world conditions. It falls short of the power and performance of higher-end GPUs but for those on a budget it's an ideal choiceThe previous Tomb Raider game shows a bit of odd behavior at 1080p on some of the 'mainstream' GPUs (390, 480, 970, and 1060), likely due to the use of TressFX—the newer GPUs often have better geometry throughput. The closed cooling fin design reminds us of the GeForce GTX 1070, and it should provide ample performance given the 1060's 120W TDP.The GeForce GTX 1060’s back end is a bit of a departure from previous designs.
Up top, we find the illuminated GeForce GTX logo, along with a six-pin power connector.Nvidia builds its flagship GeForce GTX 1080 using a complete GP104 processor with four Graphics Processing Clusters enabled. Somewhat surprisingly, even in an AMD-centric title that includes DX12 support, the GTX 1060 comes out ahead of both the R9 390 and RX 480. (Spoiler alert: Nvidia will probably have the 1080 Ti launch just in time to compete with Vega, dropping prices on the GTX 1080/1070 as needed.