DiRT Rally

For the racing game in our benchmark suite we have Codemasters’ DiRT Rally. Codemasters continues to set the bar for graphical fidelity in racing games, delivering realistic looking environments with layered with additional graphical effects. Based on their in-house EGO engine, DiRT Rally includes a number of DirectCompute based compute shader effects, and while it’s not the most punishing game in our suite, it still takes a very good card to sustain the 60fps frame rate that driving games are best played at.

DiRT Rally - 2560x1440 - Ultra Quality

DiRT Rally - 1920x1080 - Ultra Quality

DiRT Rally is another strong showing for the GTX 1060. This time even the stock clocked card edges out GTX 980, and ASUS’s factory overclocked card adds on another 10% at 1440p. This also becomes one of the few games where GTX 1060 is plenty fast for 1440p with everything turned up, as it has no problem holding over 60fps in this game.

As for the generational comparisons, GTX 1060 remains ahead of the curve for Pascal cards. Relative to GTX 960, it offers 77% better performance. Though the gap between it and GTX 1070 is also a bit larger, with GTX 1060 offering 74% of its faster sibling’s performance. Finally, against the RX 480, GTX 1060 bests its AMD competitor by 14%.

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  • thkg - Friday, August 5, 2016 - link

    Well the price landscape is not all accurate.
    The cheapest 1060 you can buy right now cost $299 (the FE model).
    You right now can buy a RX 480 8G from newegg for $239 (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N8...
  • Ryan Smith - Friday, August 5, 2016 - link

    The pricing situation is complex at best, and frustrating at worst. At various times when I wrote this article $249 GTX 1060s and $239 RX 480s went in and out of stock. At the moment it was published, all 480s were out of stock and $249 and $279 1060s were in stock.

    The article is written with the best general advice I can give, which is based on the idea that manufacturers are frequently restocking the MSRP parts. But since things fly off the shelves so quickly, there's no real consistency day to day. (Or even hour to hour; that 480 is out of stock already). Ultimately you can get a $249 1060 about as easily as you can get a $239 480, which is to say not very (and it's not as if higher priced cards are usually any more available).
  • eddman - Saturday, August 6, 2016 - link

    Really?!! Do you know what shortage is? I clicked on that link and it said... not available.

    There ARE 1060s at $250 already. They are just hard to get.

    http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N8...
    http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N8...
    http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N8...
  • eddman - Saturday, August 6, 2016 - link

    Wrong link for the second one. This is it:

    http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N8...
  • eddman - Saturday, August 6, 2016 - link

    It seems my brain isn't cooperating. Those links are correct. This is the additional link:

    http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N8...
  • Fnnoobee - Friday, August 5, 2016 - link

    Really, Anandtech? Date of this review is Aug. 15 and yet you're using Nvidia's latest driver but AMD Crimson 16.7.1? Really?! I could see if you published this around July 19 (you know, when the card actually hit shelves), but 16.7.2, which fixed the power draw and thermal issues on RX 480 and increased performance overall across the board, released July 7, almost a month ago! 16.7.3 released July 29, which other than providing bug fixes added a significant 10 percent performance boost for RoTR which you benchmarked. I could see if you were ignorant of these releases but you even published an article on your site on July 29. I knew right away before even looking at the details of your test set up when I saw your benchmarks on RoTR, because they're far lower than numbers I've consistently achieved on the benchmark at the same settings you have on my RX 480 at stock clocks (OC I achieved about 6-7 percent more). If you can't be bothered to properly update your tests to the latest drivers and software for both product lines so ALL products get a fair shake, why even bother reviewing or comparing a product in the first place? It smacks of laziness and not being very fair and objective.
  • Ryan Smith - Friday, August 5, 2016 - link

    Thanks. 16.7.1 is actually a typo. All testing was done against 16.7.2 for the RX 480.

    As for 16.7.3, this came out much too late to be included in this review (since it takes longer than a week to produce). However I will need to go back and update the RX 480 results for that driver build for the forthcoming 470/460 reviews.
  • bill44 - Friday, August 5, 2016 - link

    Before I read it, does it mention audio and supported audio sampling rates?
    @Ryan Smith
    I know.........not at hand.......blah, blah.
    No one knows, it's not on the spec sheet, not in reviews, nowhere to be found.
  • Ryan Smith - Friday, August 5, 2016 - link

    I don't have that information or a means to test it. But was there a specific sampling rate you're looking for?
  • bill44 - Saturday, August 6, 2016 - link

    Thank Ryan.
    Yes please, 88.2KHz and 176.4KHz. Likelihood is that the other sampling rates will be supported.

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