The leak actually happened a few days late because the RX 480 had a few teething problems which kept producing negative headlines so the leak was not required. However now that has died down a bit a pair of 3DMark Firestrike benchmarks have finally been leaked and sure enough they show that Nvidia’s GTX 1060 will outperform AMD’s Radeon RX 480 by about 15 percent.

In fact the benchmarks show that it is running a similar performance to Nvidia’s Maxwell-based GTX 980 which cost $549 when it launched.
XFastest  originally posted the 3DMark Firestrike results and it all looks pretty kosher with specs that line up with the leaked numbers.

The chip will have1280 CUDA Cores although there will only be 3GB and 6GB models. The card was tested using an Intel Core i7-6700K. Still, it posted a 1080p Firestrike score of 11225. The Radeon RX 480 (8GB) had a score of 10600.

The Firestrike Ultra benchmark gives the chip a score of 3014, which bests the RX 480 meaning the Nvidia card does well at 4K.
The GTX 1060 is expected to launch at $249 which with these scores means that AMD will have some serious competition in the sub-$300 bracket.

However, there is a slight issue here, which comes to the source of my bet that a leaked benchmark would happen. No-one in the tech press actually has the GTX 1060 driver yet. We have no way of proving that the scores are true. Pro-Nvidia sites are claiming that the figures might even be better than the benchmarks. While that is true they could equally be worse.

We will know when the chips do come out. But like I said before, the GPU wars are getting nasty with all sorts of leaks which are proving to be dead ends. At this point it is not wise to trust what anyone says.