Nvidia GTX 1060 Fire Strike Results Leaked

With just about a day to go till the first GTX 1060 event, benchmark scores for the new Nvidia card have surfaced. Based off of the Pascal architecture and using the GP106 die, the GTX 1060 is meant to be Nvidia’s counter against AMD’s RX 480. In what may be a concerning sign for the red team, the GTX 1060 is reportedly doing well in 3DMark Fire Strike.

In the DX 11 benchmark, the GTX 1060 manages graphics scores of 13215 in regular Fire Strike and 2928 in Fire Strike Ultra 4K. This is approximately 8-10% faster than the RX 480, right where the leaked TFLOPs number would put it at and on par with the GTX 980. Honestly, Nvidia’s claims of 15% better performance were a bit outlandish given the lack of IPC gains with Pascal compared with Maxwell. Of course, I expect the GTX 1060 will pull ahead of the RX 480 in Nvidia optimized DX11 titles while the RX 480 will stretch it legs as DX12 continues to gain traction.

We’re also getting a GPU-Z screenshot but I would wait before placing too much trust in them. The TFLOPS, VRAM, bandwidth and shader count do match up with what we’ve come to expect. Only the TMU count and ROPs seem a little suspect.

With such close performance to the RX 480, the key to the GTX 1060 will be pricing. Nvidia does have a cheaper solution on hand with 1280 shaders over a 192bit bus compared to 2304 shaders over a 256bit bus. Whether Nvidia will try to undercut AMD or simply just rest above the RX 480 remains to be seen.