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New 1060 barely faster than my old 960

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I think you will find no issues with colours if the display.

Indeed. Its just that any LCD within my current budget wont cut it. It I had the extra cash I would overhaul the whole system. But unfortunately I could only muster the cash to upgrade my GPU. Changing my TV at this stage isnt possible. No point me upgrading to a low level LCD. As I said before, all the LCDs ive seen that impress me are £600+. However, its been a while. Maybe I should take another look...
 
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Indeed. Its just that any LCD within my current budget wont cut it. It I had the extra cash I would overhaul the whole system. But unfortunately I could only muster the cash to upgrade my GPU. Changing my TV at this stage isnt possible. No point me upgrading to a low level LCD. As I said before, all the LCDs ive seen that impress me are £600+. However, its been a while. Maybe I should take another look...

The card won't be faulty.

If you wanted more FPS you should have upgraded the CPU. As previously mentioned think of it like this...

The CPU is pushing as much as it can and is at its limit, the GTX 960 is sitting there waiting for the CPU.

You've now changed the GPU to a 1060 and again the limit is still the CPU at 720p.

As previously mentioned if you use the nvidia virtual resolution stuff and compare both cards at 1080p or even 1440p then you will see the difference as the GFX card becomes the bottleneck and not the CPU.

As others also said even a low end LCD TV will kick your plasma to the curb. Don't go into a store and compare them, they have stupid demo modes that make grass luminous green. This is coming from a 4k LG OLED owner, even that is far superior in my home in a proper setup compared to in store :)
 
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Ok chaps. Did a bit more testing...

First, I followed the advice from the overclockers dude and ran the valley GPU benchmark. And yes, my results matched other 1060 owners results online. Maybe a trickle less. 100 points at most.

Then I ran GTA5 with DSR at both 1.5 (1080) and 2.0 (1440).

At 1.5, the game ran a smidge slower. Maybe 10fps at most. at 2.0, there was quite a drop in performance. I assume this is the point where my GPU starts to bottleneck?

I would like to try Primal but that game doesnt seem to offer me the DSR resolutions. Anybody know if Primal can use DSR?

So, it seems you bright fellows were correct. When running a pure GPU app, im getting similar performance to other 1060s. And GTA not losing much performance when I ran at 1.5 is also indicative of a CPU bottleneck. Am I correct in my above assumptions?
 
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I don't think its the cpu at all..there no way that cpu is bottlenecking to the extent its not going to improve from a 960 to a 1060??

i went from a 4gb 960 to a 1060 6gb with an i3 6100 and doubled my framerate just about in most games..surely its something else.

Install msi afterburner if you have it and enable the screen monitoring software and run a few benchies or games and you will be able to see live on screen whats going on with cpu/gpu useage...its the only sure way to physically see whats happening.
 
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I would take 1080p gaming over 720p with marginally better colour reproduction/black levels(does it even matter that much when gaming).
Yea, it's huge. My first HDTV was a plasma. It was like somebody finally put color back into life. Games are often colorful and dark, especially nowadays, and so there's really no medium where these image quality aspects are more important.

I felt similarly ecstatic when I changed my TN monitor to an IPS, though it lacked black levels I wanted.

I only just got the 1060 yesterday from ***********, so I assume im still covered by 7 day returns. But in truth, I may keep it regardless as im confident ill upgrade some of the other components before the year is out.

After I do some more tests today, and if I can confirm the CPU is bottlenecking, I may well fork out for a 4670k in a few months.
I really dont think you need to upgrading anything else with the display you are using. When people are saying the CPU is a bottleneck for you, they aren't saying you have a poor CPU and should upgrade it, they are merely saying that at 720p, your GPU is so underutilized that CPU becomes the primary bottleneck to more performance. But do you need more performance if you're already at 60fps in most any game? Does your TV even go up to 100hz or more? If it does, maybe I can understand, but otherwise, if you're at native resolution and 60fps, I'm not sure why you'd need anything better than what you already had.

Your CPU is not bad by any means. A 4670k will be able to push 33% higher clocks or so, but it's not going to be a gamechanger. I wouldn't say it's really worth the extra £200 plus installation hassle when Haswell is not even latest CPU tech, but again - up to you to decide. I feel like maybe you have very different ideas of 'value' when it comes to getting more performance.
 
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I don't think its the cpu at all..there no way that cpu is bottlenecking to the extent its not going to improve from a 960 to a 1060??

i went from a 4gb 960 to a 1060 6gb with an i3 6100 and doubled my framerate just about in most games..surely its something else.

Install msi afterburner if you have it and enable the screen monitoring software and run a few benchies or games and you will be able to see live on screen whats going on with cpu/gpu useage...its the only sure way to physically see whats happening.

Yeah, thats the step im currently taking. Im going to check CPU/GPU usage using EVGA precision.

Like yourself, i was suspicious. But its hard to argue with my results in Valley matching other 1060 owners. Yet my game performance doesn't. Maybe your extra 0.5mhz is doing the trick?

Ill report back once ive checked usage...

Yea, it's huge. My first HDTV was a plasma. It was like somebody finally put color back into life. Games are often colorful and dark, especially nowadays, and so there's really no medium where these image quality aspects are more important.

I felt similarly ecstatic when I changed my TN monitor to an IPS, though it lacked black levels I wanted.


I really dont think you need to upgrading anything else with the display you are using. When people are saying the CPU is a bottleneck for you, they aren't saying you have a poor CPU and should upgrade it, they are merely saying that at 720p, your GPU is so underutilized that CPU becomes the primary bottleneck to more performance. But do you need more performance if you're already at 60fps in most any game? Does your TV even go up to 100hz or more? If it doesn't, maybe I can understand, but otherwise, if you're at native resolution and 60fps, I'm not sure why you'd need anything better than what you already had.

Your CPU is not bad by any means. A 4670k will be able to push 33% higher clocks or so, but it's not going to be a gamechanger. I wouldn't say it's really worth the extra £200 plus installation hassle when Haswell is not even latest CPU tech, but again - up to you to decide. I feel like maybe you have very different ideas of 'value' when it comes to getting more performance.

Its with vsync off that im getting the results. Games that ran at 80-90fps with vsync off on my 960 are running the same on the 1060. Even though i believe there is something to the bottlenecking thing... im still amazed ive seen next to no improvement in games.
 
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Its with vsync off that im getting the results. Games that ran at 80-90fps with vsync off on my 960 are running the same on the 1060. Even though i believe there is something to the bottlenecking thing... im still amazed ive seen next to no improvement in games.

It's because 720p is so little pixels it's easy to bottleneck the CPU. Even an overclocked version would likely still see some bottlenecking at 720p.

You can use DSR for now to get you through. But I highly suggest you upgrade to a 1080p display. They are cheap now a days aswell 55" for £400 or so.

1.5x is going to be your 1080p resolution. So set it to that to see what kind of performance to expect.

2x is 1440p which a 1060 is not quite built for so I'd stay away from using that only for testing purposes.
 
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I did some usage tests using evga precision.

My GPU usage on the GTA5 benchmark shows the GPU is being used between 50% and 90% depending on the scene. The city tends to be on the lower side, whcih does kind of point to a CPU bottleneck as the city is more CPU intensive as far as I understand. But on the scenes where my usage is 90%, I would expect performance similar to other 1060 owners, right? According to the online benches I should be getting almost twice the speed of my 960. Even at 90% its nowhere near that.

EDIT

I ran the farcry primal benchmark and that ran at 90+% usage right though. But the result is lower than the online benchmarks for this card and game.

Im now even more confused.:confused:
 
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I did some usage tests using evga precision.

My GPU usage on the GTA5 benchmark shows the GPU is being used between 50% and 90% depending on the scene. The city tends to be on the lower side, whcih does kind of point to a CPU bottleneck as the city is more CPU intensive as far as I understand. But on the scenes where my usage is 90%, I would expect performance similar to other 1060 owners, right? According to the online benches I should be getting almost twice the speed of my 960. Even at 90% its nowhere near that.

Im now even more confused.:confused:

https://www.futuremark.com/benchmarks/3dmark

Download install, run the firestrike benchmark and post back with score.

I take it other than that you have latest pascal 1060 drivers etc?
 
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I did some usage tests using evga precision.

My GPU usage on the GTA5 benchmark shows the GPU is being used between 50% and 90% depending on the scene. The city tends to be on the lower side, whcih does kind of point to a CPU bottleneck as the city is more CPU intensive as far as I understand. But on the scenes where my usage is 90%, I would expect performance similar to other 1060 owners, right? According to the online benches I should be getting almost twice the speed of my 960. Even at 90% its nowhere near that.

Im now even more confused.:confused:

Don't you understand that your 960 was already far too powerful for for 720p gaming?

You could sli titan x in there your framerate isn't going to improve.
 
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https://www.futuremark.com/benchmarks/3dmark

Download install, run the firestrike benchmark and post back with score.

I take it other than that you have latest pascal 1060 drivers etc?

Ive already run the valley GPU benchmark and that matched the results of other 1060 users. So no problems there. Its my game performance that isnt right. But its becoming increasingly clear that the higher the CPU usage of the app, the lower my GPU usage goes. Not entirely conclusive, but its looking that way.

My GTA5 results we're strange, but considering my GPU usage drops heavily in the city, thats pretty telling.

Don't you understand that your 960 was already far too powerful for for 720p gaming?

You could sli titan x in there your framerate isn't going to improve.

Well, my 960 didnt quite run modern games at max settings 720p at 60fps locked. I (naively) thought a new GPU would give me those extra few frames to get me there, but it hasnt. My mistake, it seems. :(
 
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There's a very simple test for this..DSR.

Use something like a 1.5x DSR factor with nvidia control panel, and/or enable custom resolutions through your desktop.

Load up any decently demanding game, play with your 960 for a bit, swap out, play with the 1060.. should answer whether you have a bottleneck on your CPU or not.

Also grab MSI Afterburner and monitor GPU usage and power limit during gaming, chances are (as said above) that 720p isn't using your card enough.
 
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Your GPU is fine if you are within 100 point of other 1060s in valley/heaven benchmarks. Your CPU is still fine but you can over clock for some extra 'free' performance if you put a little time in to tweaking it.

As others has said, your monitor is holding you back now, there's not much point upgrading the PC if you plan on keeping that display.
 
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Well, my 960 didnt quite run modern games at max settings 720p at 60fps locked. I (naively) thought a new GPU would give me those extra few frames to get me there, but it hasnt. My mistake, it seems. :(

You can send your 1060 back and get ya self an unlocked i5 that would probably get you there.

If you like plasmas can't you pick up a second hand st50 or something similar?
If you go on http://www.hdtvtest.co.uk/news/category/reviews and select plasma you can get the model numbers of decent plasmas.
 
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Did some more testing using afterburner and GTA5.

Can I ask, what CPU usage would cause a bottleneck? Because in the city my CPU usage is at 85% and my GPU at around 60%. Is 85% enough to cause problems?

Having said that, even in scenes where my CPU is at around 60%, I *still* never see my GPU get above 70%. Does this seem normal?


There's a very simple test for this..DSR.

Use something like a 1.5x DSR factor with nvidia control panel, and/or enable custom resolutions through your desktop.

Load up any decently demanding game, play with your 960 for a bit, swap out, play with the 1060.. should answer whether you have a bottleneck on your CPU or not.

Also grab MSI Afterburner and monitor GPU usage and power limit during gaming, chances are (as said above) that 720p isn't using your card enough.

Ive tried 1.5x already in GTA5. I saw a 10%-15% dip in performance. At 2.0x it was more like 30%.



Also, just want to add, I really appreciate the effort from you guys. I never expected this much feedback. This is a cracking community! Thanks very much for your help so far.
 
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ok in afterburner or evga precision are you upping the power limit?,its possible your hitting that and throttling.

if you haven't over clocked,try adding 150 to the core and 400 to the memory and re run the tests to see if theres any improvement.


also in NVidia panel there is an option in the power management mode,i think it needs to be set to maximum performance.

I also saw on another forum where someone was having poor performance with his 1070 and it turned out to be the pci power and cpu power settings in the power options menu in windows.
20zy9ts.jpg
 
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I just tried Primal at 1080p. I know this game isnt CPU intensive so I didnt expect much of a drop ( if the bottlenecking theory is correct ) but I lost about 25% in framerates compared to 720p.

It seems just when I feel like im getting a grip on whats going on, a test like the above come along and contradict my conclusions. If indeed the CPU is the bottleneck, why am I seeing such a drop when switching to 1080?


ok in afterburner or evga precision are you upping the power limit?,its possible your hitting that and throttling.

if you haven't over clocked,try adding 150 to the core and 400 to the memory and re run the tests to see if theres any improvement.


also in NVidia panel there is an option in the power management mode,i think it needs to be set to maximum performance.

Ive tested with and without the monitors. I dont think they are making a difference in that regard.
 
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I did some usage tests using evga precision.

My GPU usage on the GTA5 benchmark shows the GPU is being used between 50% and 90% depending on the scene. The city tends to be on the lower side, whcih does kind of point to a CPU bottleneck as the city is more CPU intensive as far as I understand. But on the scenes where my usage is 90%, I would expect performance similar to other 1060 owners, right? According to the online benches I should be getting almost twice the speed of my 960. Even at 90% its nowhere near that.

EDIT

I ran the farcry primal benchmark and that ran at 90+% usage right though. But the result is lower than the online benchmarks for this card and game.

Im now even more confused.:confused:

The results of your tests aren't surprising. The holy grail of GPU utilisation is to have it sit at a solid 99%, anything significantly lower, or having it bounce up and down, indicates a problem. In your case a large bottleneck. If you're unwilling or unable to change your screen then upgrading your CPU is the best course of action. You can sell your existing CPU and pick up a second hand 4670k for less than £200, and with a cheap after market cooler you can push the clock speed up. At the very least, at the absolute minimum, this will give you the last few FPS you are seeking, and raise your minimum FPS levels. Actually probably raise your minimums to above 60 FPS anyway.
 
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The results of your tests aren't surprising. The holy grail of GPU utilisation is to have it sit at a solid 99%, anything significantly lower, or having it bounce up and down, indicates a problem. In your case a large bottleneck. If you're unwilling or unable to change your screen then upgrading your CPU is the best course of action. You can sell your existing CPU and pick up a second hand 4670k for less than £200, and with a cheap after market cooler you can push the clock speed up. At the very least, at the absolute minimum, this will give you the last few FPS you are seeking, and raise your minimum FPS levels.

But im seeing the poor performance even when my CPU is around 60%. Ive not seen my CPU get above 85% except rare occasions where it touches 90% for a moment. Most of the time its floating at around 70%. In primal my CPU never went above 70% and yet the performance is lacking. My 720 performance is less than most online benches at 1080. I dont understand how it can be the CPU if its not getting above 70%.
 
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