GTX 1060 6GB in 2021 vs RTX 3060 – How much more FPS?
According to the steam hardware survey, nearly 10% of active gamers on steam are using a GTX 1060. That means there are literally millions of gamers with these cards in their systems, but this 6GB model turned 5 years old a few weeks ago so it begs the question – how well does it hold up in 2021? Let’s test it at different settings and find out.
For the sake of clarity, I’m using this STRIX GTX 1060 6GB, with a Ryzen 5600X and 16GB of 3600MHz RAM, and I’m testing at 1080p as that’s what this card was billed as at the time. I’m going to test at various levels of settings so you can see how it holds up not just at ultra settings but across the range.
Right let’s get started, first up is Watchdogs Legion. At low settings the 1060 offers a respectable 66FPS average, and 51FPS in the 1% lows. The catch to that performance is the image quality is noticeably bad, luckily though, stepping up even to medium only drops 5FPS average, still keeping it above that crucial 60FPS target, but improves the visuals to the point I wouldn’t be frustrated while playing. Setting it to high does improve that further, at the cost of almost 10FPS average, dropping it below 60FPS and while it’s still playable, personally I would rather take the quality hit over the performance drop. If you aren’t though, you can step it up further to very high where you get just 43FPS average, and 33FPS in the 1% lows. This isn’t a great time, but at least it should look nice. Lastly, if you prefer what honestly feels like a slideshow compared to low or medium, you can pick ultra. That’ll net you just 29FPS average, and a dreadful 22FPS in the 1% lows. Ouch. You’d struggle to justify running at ultra with that sort of performance.
Moving onto Cyberpunk, I should clarify that there are 2 different preset options, the overall quality preset and the textures preset. I’m running low quality, low textures, medium quality, medium textures, high quality high textures, and ultra quality high textures as that’s as high as it goes for that. You can tweak the settings further, by say running high quality but medium textures, but since I’ve already got around 50 different results to show you in this video I’m going to keep it as what I’ve listed.
So, even on low quality, low textures, the 1060 can’t eke out anything close to 60FPS, with it’s best run being just 47FPS average, and 38FPS in the 1% lows. That’s still playable, I mean people play this game on consoles at 30FPS so clearly it’s possible to play it, but it’s not the absolute best experience. Actually one of the downsides to running at low everything was that not only did the game look pretty bad, but textures were popping in like crazy so you’d often crash while driving around or suddenly run into something as you got closer. Not ideal. At medium it gets worse, just 35.5FPS average and 30FPS in the 1% lows, high drops it to just 30FPS average, and ultra, well. Yeah that was dreadful, just 26FPS average.
CSGO is hardly a new game, nor a very intensive one, and that’s borne out in the results. On the lowest settings while still running at 1080p the 1060 smashed out a whopping 355FPS average, and over 170FPS in the 1% lows. That’s incredibly fast compared to, well, every other game here, save for low settings Fortnite. The image quality wasn’t the best, so stepping it up to a middle ground drops the performance a hair, just 11FPS, but does offer better visual fidelity, and at well over 300FPS, unless you have a 360Hz monitor (and if you do why do you have an £800 monitor and a £200 graphics card??), you won’t be noticing that difference. Finally on the highest settings it does drop it a reasonable amount, but only to 273FPS, which again is perfectly fine.
Microsoft Flight is a game renowned for being impossible to run, and at ultra settings you’d be right, just 30FPS average at 1080p, which makes for a less than ideal playing experience. Luckily if you switch it to “high-end”, you get almost 12FPS more performance which is pretty significant. If that still isn’t enough, medium has you covered with 53FPS average, albeit with less than perfect image quality. Lastly, if you want the maximum performance and don’t care that it looks awful, “low-end” is for you with 60FPS average. Personally I think medium is where I’d hedge my bets as it struck the best balance of quality and performance on this card.
Finally in Fortnite, if you want to look at 2 whole pixels moving around the screen at almost 500FPS, low is what you need. It looks dreadful thanks to the 44% render resolution meaning it’s rendering at 845×452 and upscaling, and no it’s not a fancy upscaler like DLSS or FSR. Medium is a little better with it’s 66% render scale, aka 720p, and still offers an astonishing 246FPS average. If you’d prefer to render at 1080p, high is the preset for you, and it still offers 89FPS average here so if you have a 144Hz monitor you’ll see some benefit here. Lastly if quality is king for you, epic settings delivers just over 60FPS average. Personally the quality benefit isn’t big enough to justify that performance hit, but of course that’s up to you.
So, like you might have expected, the 1060 isn’t exactly an ultra-settings, high refresh rate monster. I’m not sure it ever was though, and for the sort of budget card it’s meant to be by running medium or high settings you should still have a pretty decent experience in most games. Some, like Cyberpunk or Flight will struggle more even on lower settings but on the whole it should be at least playable.
But, now that stock of new GPUs is slowly becoming more available, is it time to upgrade? A card like this RTX 3060 is the obvious choice, but how much of a performance advantage does it offer? Let’s test it and see how it compares at the various settings.
Again starting with Watchdogs Legion on both low and medium you get over 100FPS, in stark contrast to the 66FPS you get from the 1060. In fact, since both the low and medium settings runs are so similar it’s reasonable to assume the 3060 is actually being bottlenecked somewhat by the 5600X CPU, meaning the difference could be even more stark with a faster chip. On high and very high the 3060 offers almost double the performance of the 1060 running at 82 and 93FPS respectively, and even at ultra the 3060 hits 59FPS average, where the 1060 runs at just 29FPS. Personally, even if I had the 3060 I’d run on very high, dropping from 82FPS to 59FPS is far too much for what ends up being a pretty minimal visual difference while playing.
In Cyberpunk you’ll notice a load of extra results here, that’s because the RTX 3060 supports, well, RTX and the GTX 1060 doesn’t. For the most part, I can’t say I’d want to enable ray tracing here, as on the ray tracing ultra mode with no DLSS you get just 33FPS average on the 3060, compared to 64FPS average with the standard ultra preset. You can set it to the ray tracing medium preset while does help at 40FPS average, or enable DLSS to get 54FPS average on the ray traced ultra setting, but that’s still leagues below the non-ray traced results.
Comparing apples to apples, the 3060 offers well over 2 times more performance than the 1060 here, on medium it gets 89FPS compared to just 35.5FPS from the 1060. That’s a completely different playing experience and makes for a much more enjoyable time. The other advantage of the RTX suite is DLSS, which effectively renders the frame at a lower resolution then uses an AI model to upscale it intelligently, meaning you get more performance for generally minimal quality loss. Running at Ultra, but with DLSS set to auto, the 3060 offered over 90FPS average beating even it’s medium settings result. If you have an RTX card, enabling DLSS here is a no brainer.
Moving onto CSGO, that offers a similar level of added performance, although not quite as much as you might expect thanks to the CPU being a mild limiting factor. Still, getting 567FPS on the lowest settings is incredible, as is over 400FPS on the highest.
In Microsoft Flight the 3060 offers a very significant advantage. From just 30FPS average on ultra with the 1060, to just shy of 60FPS on the 3060, that’s a difference you’ll notice in game. If you want to turn the settings down, on medium you get just shy of 100FPS average on the 3060, compared to almost exactly half that from the 1060. It’s safe to say the 3060 would offer you a significantly better experience.
Finally, in Fortnite again there are a few extra settings available to the RTX card, namely ray tracing and DLSS. Fortnite offers multiple ray tracing settings with multiple levels of each, but again to keep things simple I’ve only added a DLSS run, and one with all the ray tracing settings maxed out and DLSS enabled. Much like Cyberpunk I wouldn’t be enabling all those settings, as you get just 63FPS average even with DLSS enabled and set to performance. But, if you turn those settings off, leaving just DLSS enabled, well then you get nearly 200FPS on epic settings, or almost 4 times more performance than the 1060 on epic. Even without DLSS the 3060 still runs 2 times faster on epic, where you’ll be able to make use of a high refresh rate display even on the highest settings. You can lower them a little more, but on low you get pretty much the same performance as the 1060 as the CPU is the limiting factor at those settings.
So, if you want to double your performance, or in some cases quadruple your performance, then yeah picking up a 3060 would be great. I know availability isn’t perfect yet, which is why it’s also good to know that with a few settings tweaked the 1060 still offers a playable gaming experience even in more demanding titles – and for esports games like CSGO it’s just as good as anything.
