It’s been about six months since BTR compared the RX 480 versus the GTX 1060 and versus the 290X. It will be interesting to see if there have been any major performance changes since then. Has AMD neglected Hawaii in favor of Polaris, and what about Pascal performance?

This evaluation will revisit 25 games from the launch evaluation of the RX 480 on June 29, 2016, the follow-up on July 17 where we noted significant Polaris performance increases with Crimson 16.7.2, and we will also include the original GTX 1060 drivers from its launch on July 19, 2016.

We will use the same 25 games that we benched then, and we will again compare them using the latest drivers, plus we will add 11 newer games including Watch Dogs 2 and Tom Clancy’s The Division which now has a DX12 pathway for a total of 35 games.

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The GTX 1060 and the RX 480 are in a similar price range and they have been natural competitors for almost 6 months. Our game benchmark suite has changed over the past six months as we always strive to update our tested games to include the latest and most popular titles at the time of posting.

We mainly want to see how these upper-midrange GPUs stand now in relation to each other by playing the latest games with updated drivers at demanding settings that we usually bench at 3840×2160, 2560×1440, and at 1920×1080.

Let’s check out the RX 480 versus the GTX 1060 and versus the 290X after we look over our test configuration on the next page.