@Trevor1191 Seriously, unless there is a real rush for you to get a computer now and right now now now, I would wait for Sapphire to release their aftermarket RX 480s, since they'll have better circuitry, better cooling and therefore have the potential to overclock further. Right now, the reference 480 is biting at the heels of the MSI Lightning 290X, one of the fastest 290Xs ever made.
The 1060 could be nice but Pascal hasn't been that impressive so far. It still suffers from framerate drops in DX12, it still doesn't have a hardware async scheduler, and despite its ability to overclock to very high speeds, the performance gains drop out of the sky like a hailstone. Not to mention they killed SLI for the 1060, which is ridiculous, because adding a second RX 480 gives more graphics horsepower than a 295X2.
Nvidia has a habit of releasing a fast card at first, but they all but leave it alone forever afterwards. AMD's cards end up quite a bit faster than them by the end of the product cycle. It happened with the 7970, the 290X, the 390 and it'll happen with the Fiji and Polaris cards as well. If you plan to hang onto the card for a while, I'd go with the 480, because it will increase in performance over time while the 1060 will remain more or less the same. And if trends are to be believed, the 1060 will be quite a bit more than $270 owing to Pascal's history of supply shortages and not sticking to MSRPs. And aftermarket coolers will be quite a bit more expensive.
The 7970 ended up nearly 16.5% faster by the release of Crimson than at it's initial release driver. 4% increase in performance each year without ever having to upgrade your physical GPU, that's better than the improvements Intel makes on some new platforms. nVidia's GTX 680 did see driver improvements, but never really stretched its life span and only ended up 6-8% faster.
So from past examples, yeah, AMD is better in the long run for someone who maybe doesn't want to upgrade every generation.
If only AMD cards had a good start with drivers (they never do apparently, except for probably the RX 480), the 270X outperforming the GTX 760, imagine if that was the case at launch, the 270X was quite a bit cheaper, so it would have annihilated the GTX 760.
AMD has good drivers, but you need to remeber Nvidia's driver team is 10x the size with 10x the budget, and Nvidia will usually go game by game and manually rewrite shaders and write custom patches of code to optimize games for their hardware
Yes, particularly in the benchmark suite most reviewers use to promote themselves further than they actually deserve... One of the reasons the Tek GPU reviews are the best.
But on topic: I'd get the Sapphire 480 8gb when it's launched, should have much better longevity than the 1060 if history has taught us anything. Also, you could potentially throw a second one in there to make it compete with the higher end cards (yes ik... 'just get the biggest card you can" etc. etc.).
You're thinking of the 7870 vs the GTX 760. As the 7870, Pitcairn sat quite a bit behind the GTX 760, but as the R9 270X both driver and clockrate improvements meant that it sat nearly level with the GTX 760. Go check out Anandtech's benchmark pages and compare the 7870 - GTX 760 from 2013, then the R9 270X - GTX 760 from 2014.
Well to be fair, Graphics drivers aren't simple software either, nor is grpahics hardware.
I just think people need to stop being so opinionated to GPUs, and people also need to realize letting Nvidia have such huge market share, and simply bashing AMD for the sake of it hurts everyone. Nvidia can price gouge, and disagble SLI on cards for no good reason, while AMD can't sell a GPU because everyone spreads rumors.
amd sticking to gcn with minor revisions along the line means all gcn cards tend to get nice updates on driver release (when they happen :D).
If I was a 900 series nvidia owner I would be worried about now as they will most likely suffer the same fate of the 700 series.
still, nvidia owners seem to have tonnes of cash so I guess they don't mind having to 'upgrade' more often and throw more money at the company they love.
my 970's SLI performance sucked dick, couldn't play cities skylines because 3.5gb vram, and didn't support my monitors freesync (no good reason not to!!!)