RX 480 vs GTX 1060 (same price)

[MarkizSchnitzel]

For keeping it 3 years 480 8gb will be the best bet. You get more VRAM and DX12 / Vulkan tuned hardware which is where more games will be going in the future. By that time even indie games running off unity / unreal engine will be in DX12/Vulkan for the core engine.

Consoles are all GCN / AMD based so you'll have newer ports that are already more tuned for AMD hardware.

Yes, but he will sell or get rid of it in 3 years. You buy for now. Always.
It's like saying to someone who is cash restrained, buy gas engine car because gas prices are likely to go down, when there is already diesel there.

 

[MarkizSchnitzel]

No sane, rational person would spend $400-1200 on a card to get marginally better looking visuals. Not everybody is a 24/7 hardcore XXXXXXTREME gamer.

No, i meant that as in, why take the 480 over 1060 which has a better performance now, and for some time to come.

 

[MarkizSchnitzel]

We are talking about a slight better performance in games during a period where both cards easily achieve playable performance against a time where potentially better performance might be the difference between a good experience and a frustrating experience.

Suffering above 60 fps vs slightly more above 60 fps isn't really suffering.

Ok, good point there.
That said, are 480 cards comparable in noise department?

 

[Shmee]

It seems that some people decided to further derail the thread after my warning, so warnings were handed out. Please stop the back and forth bickering, take it to your own thread if need be.

 

[Bacon1]

Yes, but he will sell or get rid of it in 3 years. You buy for now. Always.
It's like saying to someone who is cash restrained, buy gas engine car because gas prices are likely to go down, when there is already diesel there.

He said he wants to keep the card for 3 years. The 480 and 1060 are very close in all current games, its mostly old games where the 1060 does better. He can pair it with a freesync monitor and have a much better experience over the next 3 years than with Nvidia.

That said, are 480 cards comparable in noise department?

Yes most if not all of the AIB are very similar to 1060s and often use the same cooling design.

 

[cytg111]

780gtx (non TI) here, 3 years old, bought the fastest available at the time. Three years later this card is "keplered", ie. not supported, put on legacy mode, nothing optimized for it, 3A titles runs mid-high settings@1080p.(very high/ultra is not feasable)

If I bought a top-end pascal card today I would expect three years again, same story, however you are looking at a 1060, not a 1080, I'd say that three years is optimistic at best.

edit : this is not a pro/con amd nvidia post, just information, at the end of the day three years is not a bad run, is it?

 

[antihelten]

Yes, but he will sell or get rid of it in 3 years. You buy for now. Always.

I obviously can't speak for others, but personally when I buy a new GPU, I try to ensure that it is overkill for now, simply so that I can be relatively certain that it will still hold up decently in the future.

In other words I specifically don't buy for the now (since all the GPUs I buy are overkill for the now), I buy for the future (where the GPU may only be just adequate). I don't really care If the new GPU I buy gives me 120 or 160 FPS today, but I very much care whether it gives me 30 or 40 FPS 3 years from now (hard as that may be to predict).

Buying for the now and only the now is the same as saying that you don't care about longevity.

 

[Pantalaimon]

Buying for the now and only the now is the same as saying that you don't care about longevity.

That to me sounds like a false equivalence. Because you make it sound like only people who buy flagship cards care about longevity. Many people can't afford to buy flagship cards and because of that they have to buy cards from the mid tier. This does not mean that they don't want that card and its performance to last as long as they can stretch it based on their requirements and tolerance to lower quality settings in the game.

 

[antihelten]

That to me sounds like a false equivalence. Because you make it sound like only people who buy flagship cards care about longevity. Many people can't afford to buy flagship cards and because of that they have to buy cards from the mid tier. This does not mean that they don't want that card and its performance to last as long as they can stretch it based on their requirements and tolerance to lower quality settings in the game.

Ok allow me to rephrase it then:

Buying for the now and only the now is the same as saying that you don't prioritize* longevity.

*In your example of people not being able to afford faster cards, they are prioritizing price over longevity.

 

[thestbar]

So we come back on my question. Which are the best AIB models for RX 480? (Because I can't find a place where they compare them) I would like to know about good GTX 1060 AIB models. But I think I keen on the red side.

 

[raghu78]

the best rx480 cards are Msi Rx 480 gaming , Powercolor Rx 480 Red Devil and Sapphire Rx 480 Nitro. The Msi gaming and Powercolor Red devil cards are quieter than sapphire nitro. Powercolor card is big at 12.2 inches so make sure your case can fit if you pick that one. I would give the nod to Msi gaming as it has the best combination of low noise, size and very good build quality.

 

[thestbar]

the best rx480 cards are Msi Rx 480 gaming , Powercolor Rx 480 Red Devil and Sapphire Rx 480 Nitro. The Msi gaming and Powercolor Red devil cards are quieter than sapphire nitro. Powercolor card is big at 12.2 inches so make sure your case can fit if you pick that one. I would give the nod to Msi gaming as it has the best combination of low noise, size and very good build quality.

I started to keen on buying the RX 480 because the Gigabyte G1 model costs ~310 Euro when the same GTX 1060 model costs ~350 Euro.
But things are more complicated for the MSI Gaming X models, where RX 480 comes for 360 and GTX 1060 comes on 370.

Again and again people say that Strix RX 480 is bad so I will not even think about buying it.

The Nitro one I saw on reviews that isn't very cool and produces some noise. Also, it comes for 340 Euro. Obviously for me it is out of competition, because for me the heat matters, when there isn't much difference on the cost.

Something in my mind says that if I go for the MSI the GTX 1060 probably would be better option. I will check the availability, too.

 

[96Firebird]

What are the lowest prices on the RX 480 8GB and GTX 1060 6GB? Better yet, where are you shopping?

 

[kalrith]

I don't know about the 1060, but new Jet.com customers can get a MSI 480 8GB Gaming X card for $230 after rebate: http://slickdeals.net/f/9139127-new...ics-card-230-or-less-after-20-rebate-free-s-h

Edit: My answer to this question is the 480 for its better propensity for Vulkan/DX12 and the past examples of AMD cards improving over time. The 1060 would be my choice if I were concerned about the extra power draw of the 480, which I'm not.

Edit2: It appears that the 1060 Windforce is the same $230 AR price right now: https://www.amazon.com/Gigabyte-GeForce-1060-WINDFORCE-GV-N1060WF2OC-6GD/dp/B01JNUO6BG

 

[repoman0]

were you connected via DIsplayport to your monitors? I also have an MSI, but a 470, and have had issues with one of my monitors not waking up. If I connect through DVI it would work fine. I recently played around with my motherboard's BIOS settings to disable energy savings but I also updated to the newest 16.9.2 driver and made other changes I've since forgotten at the same time so I'm not sure which one fixed the issues.

No displayport, I tried both via DVI and HDMI, and two separate monitors -- one Dell 27" 1440p and my new Samsung 55" 4k TV. (The TV is the reason I moved from my 290 actually. The 290 doesn't have HDMI 2.0 for 4k res at 60hz)

I also tried messing around a bunch with the drivers, energy saving options, and different sleep modes. I found that hibernate mode worked fine, i.e. cold boot, but otherwise it was very inconsistent, 80/20 at least that the display wouldn't wake up with no way to get it to do anything except restart. I think 16.9.1 was the latest at the time I bought the card, and I hadn't installed the Windows 10 anniversary update yet. I'd like to try it again with those two updates, but obviously can't at this point and I am happy with the 1060, other than having a bias toward AMD products.

 

[thestbar]

What are the lowest prices on the RX 480 8GB and GTX 1060 6GB? Better yet, where are you shopping?

G1 and XFX models comes for 300euro for rx 480 and Windforce and Gainward comes for 300 euro on Gtx 1060 side (Always 8gb and 6gb models)

 

[Ansau]

If the XFX is the GTR model I would go for that one. If it's the RS instead, then the Gainward 1060 would be the best choice for you, or the 480 STRIX if price isn't that far.

Btw, Strix isn't that bad. It just needs a custom fan profile because there are issues with stock ones and Crimson messing with them. Temps are fine, only beaten by Gaming X and XFX GTR, although that massive heatsink isn't designed for Polaris and could do much better if heatpipes were properly allocated.

 

[thestbar]

If the XFX is the GTR model I would go for that one. If it's the RS instead, then the Gainward 1060 would be the best choice for you, or the 480 STRIX if price isn't that far.

Btw, Strix isn't that bad. It just needs a custom fan profile because there are issues with stock ones and Crimson messing with them. Temps are fine, only beaten by Gaming X and XFX GTR, although that massive heatsink isn't designed for Polaris and could do much better if heatpipes were properly allocated.

GTR one comes for 20 more. Is it so much better ? I hadn't even noticed that these 2 were different models

 

[GaiaHunter]

Ok, good point there.
That said, are 480 cards comparable in noise department?

The only 480 I've seen and heard is the Powercolor Red Devil and that can't be heard above the case fans.

 

[Ansau]

GTR one comes for 20 more. Is it so much better ? I hadn't even noticed that these 2 were different models

Yes, the RS should be avoided as it's hot and louder as hell, while the GTR is one of the best options, similar to Gaming X.

 

[frozentundra123456]

He said he wants to keep the card for 3 years. The 480 and 1060 are very close in all current games, its mostly old games where the 1060 does better. He can pair it with a freesync monitor and have a much better experience over the next 3 years than with Nvidia.



Yes most if not all of the AIB are very similar to 1060s and often use the same cooling design.

So the op is concerned about an equal price comparison and you want him to buy a new monitor as well? If he has that kind of money and wants future proofing, he would do better to get a more powerful card like the 1070, but obviously you won't recommend that.

 

[Bacon1]

So the op is concerned about an equal price comparison and you want him to buy a new monitor as well? If he has that kind of money and wants future proofing, he would do better to get a more powerful card like the 1070, but obviously you won't recommend that.

I never said he had to buy the monitor only it was another option and one he could make in the next 3 years without having to pay the GSync tax.

 

[blastingcap]

I have both a GTX 1060 6GB and a RX 470 4GB in my household (one for me, one for the wife).

- Ignore the "AMD is DX12 futureproof" hype

The reality is that NV has less improvement-room in DX12 than the AMD RX 480, but GTX 1060 is the faster card to begin with. So if AMD = 100 and NV = 110 in DX11, maybe AMD = 115 and NV = 120 in DX12. It's basically a tie but AMD still hasn't beaten NV. Anandtech had a good writeup on why this is... ignore the lunatic claims that Pascal doesn't have DX12. It does. It just implements differently than AMD. Also, most of the games with DX12 aren't natively DX12, and thus are not useful indicators of what native DX12 games will be like. DX12 takes more programming skill to develop for and trying to bolt it onto DX11 games doesn't work out very well. One of the few games that is natively DX12 is Ashes, and if you look at what happens in that title, AMD Polaris cards do gain a little more performance than Pascal, but that just merely allows AMD to catch up, not surpass. Similarly, in Futuremark's Time Spy, they programmed DX12 in a vendor-agnostic way, and you see GTX 1060 beating RX 480 there in DX12. So unless a game company takes AMD or NV money to try to optimize it just for AMD or NV, we'll probably end up seeing a lot of ties and near-ties between the RX 480 and GTX 1060 in native DX12 games. And if it ever boils down to game companies taking money to optimize for one arch over another, guess what, NV has way deeper pockets.

Most sites are really lazy about testing DX12. E.g., many sites breathlessly talked about how AMD beat NV in the Deus Ex Mankind Divided DX12 beta on the basis of benchmarks. In reality, they didn't do real life gameplay, and they didn't do frametime analysis. Under realistic conditions like gameplay and looking at frametime, AMD lost to NV in Deus Ex Mankind Divided DX12. Badly. I mean, AMD did fine in DX11 but in DX12, AMD got killed by NV. http://techreport.com/review/30639/...x-12-performance-in-deus-ex-mankind-divided/3 (Frametime matters more than fps because the human brain/eye hate microstutter. A high fps with bad frametimes feels worse to look at than okay fps with great frametimes.)

Also don't expect a lot of native DX12 games for a long time--long enough so that DX12 shouldn't be that big of a consideration when deciding between Polaris and Pascal. The Frankenstein-monster DX11 games that got DX12 bolted on don't seem representative. It's like, RotTR was NV-sponsored and was broken on AMD hardware. Deux Ex was AMD-sponsored and somehow wound up broken on DX12 for both NV and AMD.

- GCN is used in PS4/XBONE and AMD cards for now. I think it's unlikely AMD does a drastic overhaul of GCN until the next console gen comes out (the one after Scorpio/PS4 Pro). So although I wouldn't characterize GCN as automatically futureproof, I'd say that it's unlikely that game engines will run horribly on GCN until the next console gen. NV is less certain but they have a LOT more resources than AMD, and I really doubt NV would allow its products to falter as a result.

- However, NV Pascal has something to counter that potential GCN-bias: efficiency and more OC headroom.

Polaris 470/480 doesn't come with as much OC headroom as Pascal. OC vs OC, GTX 1060 pulls ahead by even more. Even in situations like broken DX12 implementations that favor AMD, can be partially resolved simply via OC'ing GTX 1060.

- No real diff between 4,6, and 8 GB VRAM right now for 1080p. Maybe for higher rez.

4GB vs 6GB doesn't matter at 1080p for practically all games right now, and might only start to matter above that resolution in some corner cases; even in corner cases, the difference is apparently minimal in most cases. 8GB is overkill at 1080p. A lot of newbie gamers think that buying more VRAM will somehow futureproof them... uh not exactly. The GPU has to be strong enough to make the VRAM worthwhile, else the extra VRAM is wasted. As a thought experiment, think of what happens if you try to tie 8GB of VRAM to a RX 460. Yeah, exactly. So by the time games really "need" 8GB+, you'd need a far stronger GPU than a GTX 1060/RX 480 anyway.

Overall, at the same price, the GTX 1060 is the bang for buck winner unless there is some other restriction, like if you must have FreeSync or something.

Furthermore GTX 1060 is more power efficient, particularly in multimonitor and media playback but also in gaming load and even in idle watts. For a typical gamer, this adds up to at least a few bucks per year. So using a hypothetical RX 480 vs GTX 1060 at the same price is not taking into account lower cost of ownership.

So why then did I buy a RX 470 for my wife's computer and a GTX 1060 for my own?

1. My wife's PC runs to a 1080p HDTV, so multimonitor is not an issue. I also have no restrictions on upgrade timetable for that PC. Therefore the idea is to run the RX 470 4GB (a better deal than the RX 480 4GB or 8GB imho) for 1-2 years and then swap to a better card down the road. I think it's clear to everybody closely watching the industry that NEITHER Polaris or Pascal are the bees knees architectures, so I'm not willing to pay the premium to buy a RX 480 or GTX 1060 when a RX 470 is good enough for now.

2. I can't swap the GPU in my PC for another few years, due to reasons I won't get into here. Thus I don't have the option to buy a RX 470 and upgrading in 1-2 years. Even if GTX 1060 were not the bang for buck leader, I wanted to get the most power-efficient GPU all else equal. My PC has 3 monitors, and Polaris guzzles energy when driving 2+ monitors. It's been like 6 years since Eyefinity and AMD still hasn't fully solved its multimonitor/media playback wattage woes. NV solved that years ago.

TL;DR:

GTX 1060 is the better card overall, even in native DX12 games b/c what would otherwise be ties go in favor of the GTX 1060 via the higher OC headroom. However the RX 480 isn't that far behind and realistically you can find them for a little cheaper than GTX 1060 6GB cards. However it shamefully guzzles energy on multimonitor/media playback/gameplay load which costs you a little extra in electricity bills, probably around $5-10/year for typical gamer usage patterns and electric rates.

If you're on higher than 1080p, I'd get the GTX 1060 6GB or RX 480 8GB, probably the GTX 1060 6GB if they are the same price, but the GTX 1060 is usually more expensive. Also, just get the RX 480 if you have a FreeSync monitor.

If you are on 1080p and plan to swap cards in 2 years or less, get a RX 470 4GB and wait for the next-gen cards. Trade in your RX 470 4GB at that point.

If you plan to swap cards in 3-4 years, it's too hard to say. Too many things can change in the interim. But if you pay higher electricity rates than average, I'd recommend the GTX 1060 6GB if you can get it for the same price as the RX 480 8GB, because you'll save at least a few dollars or more each year... perhaps more like $15/year if you live in high electricity rate places like Hawaii.

Edited: to correct typos and have more accurate power cost saving calculations.

 

[Bacon1]

However it shamefully guzzles energy on multimonitor/media playback/gameplay load which costs you a little extra in electricity bills, probably around $3-5/year for typical gamer usage patterns and electric rates.

But if you pay higher electricity rates than average, I'd recommend the GTX 1060 6GB if you can get it for the same price as the RX 480 8GB, because you'll save a few dollars or more each year... $10/year if you live in high electricity rate places like Hawaii.

most power-efficient GPU all else equal. My PC has 3 monitors and Polaris guzzles energy when driving 2+ monitors. It's been like 6 years since Eyefinity and AMD still hasn't solved its multimonitor/media playback wattage woes. NV solved that years ago.

For single monitor its 47 vs 56 watts.

For 3x monitor its 65 vs 82, with Fury actually the best at 59w.

https://www.computerbase.de/2016-07/geforce-gtx-1060-test/6/

Guess you should have bought a fury since you are concerned with best energy use per monitor

 

[guachi]

[snip]

Furthermore GTX 1060 is more power efficient, particularly in multimonitor and media playback but also in gaming load and even in idle watts. For a typical gamer, this adds up to a few bucks per year. So using a hypothetical RX 480 vs GTX 1060 at the same price is not taking into account lower cost of ownership.

[snip]

GTX 1060 is the better card overall, even in native DX12 games b/c what would otherwise be ties go in favor of the GTX 1060 via the higher OC headroom. However the RX 480 isn't that far behind and realistically you can find them for a little cheaper than GTX 1060 6GB cards. However it shamefully guzzles energy on multimonitor/media playback/gameplay load which costs you a little extra in electricity bills, probably around $3-5/year for typical gamer usage patterns and electric rates.

I'll use the $300 I saved on a Freesync monitor vs. a Gsync monitor to pay for the 100 years it'll take the extra electricity the 480 to add up to that. What's shameful is that nVidia has no good reason to charge me that much more for basically the same thing.

You can get a Freesync monitor for as little as $140 so basically every AMD buyer can take advantage of it.

Also, both the 480 and 1060 OC about the same % so the 1060 is 5% faster before OC and 5% faster after.