Can't decide on the 470 or 480, is the slight hit performance-wise still ok for the 470?
And I suppose 4Gb is still ok for high/vh settings at 1080 for a reasonable time, since I'm not too bothered about special texture packs.
I wouldn't worry about the overall performance difference between the two if price is your main concern. And if ultra texture settings are of no concern to you, then 4gb should be plenty for some time now. It remains to be seen, though, what the quality and demands of "medium" "low" "high" textures mean in the coming years, in comparison to today's "ultra" or "very high" or whatever.
What I mean to say is, thinking about how when I was growing up, an "extra large" beverage at McDonald's is today's "medium" or even "small."
When Skyrim was released in 2011, the official Ultra HD texture pack that came out a few months later, was labeled as 2k textures and needed roughly 2gb VRAM minimum to run. Apparently, the "Skyrim HD" release that is coming out next month (free for those with Legendary edition) use 4K+ textures and, I think, using some of the best EMB mods from the community and should require ~5gb+ VRAM. This provides a nice benchmark of how yesterday's high end is very much now the "medium-end" in the very same game, 5 years later.
Today's ultra texture packs tend to bottom out at "4K" and require roughly 3-4gb minimum, while the newest DX12 offerings are demanding 5-7gb minimums. (Some have posted that Doom is consuming up to 7gb of VRAM?).
That being said, I would be surprised if medium/lowest texture packs are pushing more than 4gb over the next couple of years.