New GPU - GTX 1060 vs RX 480

[saffer05]

So, as the title suggests, I'm looking at upgrading my graphics card from the GTX 770 2GB to one of the above.

My current system is the following:

i5 3570K @4.2GHz
8GB RAM
GTX 770 2GB
500GB SSD for vidyer gaims
1TB HDD

I've been comparing prices and watching performance comparison videos, and while generally Nvidia has, loosely speaking, about 5-15% better performance, it seems to me that AMD's 480 might be more future-proof; especially given that it's crossfire compatible, whereas the 1060 has to rely on that MDA, excplicit, implicit, what's-it-called to even have a hope of possibly, one day running more than one GPU side by side.

That said, in my experience I've found Nvidia to be more reliable and of better quality; in fact when considering a new GPU, I find myself asking whether I want to buy the graphics card equivalent of a second-hand Alpha Romeo or a first-hand Lexus.

So it's with these thoughts in mind that I'm coming to you guys to help me make this decision! Any input would be greatly appreciated.

 

[tinytomlogan]

We have had the 480's start to arrive now so if I were you Id sit back and enjoy the reviews for a few weeks rather than feeling like you have to buy right now.

 

[AlienALX]

IIRC the 1060 can only really use IMA. From my studies EMA is very similar to AFR (Alternate Frame Rendering) and produces much better results but I have heard that Nvidia will be stopping this from working in the drivers. IMA is much easier to implement, but the scaling is nowhere near as good.

I can understand what you are saying about Nvidia cards being more reliable. Historically I have had far fewer issues with Nvidia. But. It's all about aftermarket tbh. For example the Sapphire Nitro 480 has been completely and utterly redesigned from the ground up, even on how it uses power. It's also built beautifully and has a lovely back plate and LEDs for a decent price IMO. It will be hard to beat, especially as Sapphire are the "EVGA" of the AMD world.

What I mean is on Nvidia you have companies like EVGA making very high end very desirable cards. Some other companies make very high end Nvidia cards (like Galaxy's HOF 8 Pack) but IMO EVGA are the Rolls Royce of the Nvidia world.

Usually on AMD you get to choose from things like Powercolor and HIS and so on which are a bit gaudy but Sapphire have really stepped up now and their cards are very nice indeed.

Thing is Sapphire have really dropped their price on the 480. You can get one for £20 more (4gb) than a stock card and just the back plate alone would probably cost you that. That's not taking into account the better power delivery, cooler and shroud as well as their use of 8 pin in the end of the card (which I like).

They've also dropped the pre order price of their 8gb card to £239 which works out £6 more than the cheapest of the cheapy 1060s. For a card of this caliber that's pretty awesome.

So here is my advice. Right now (if you take Doom OGL being 20% faster for Nvidia and Vulkan being 20% faster on AMD which nullifies any stupid huge boosts in the % faster performance figures) the 1060 is literally a few % faster than the 480. However. Please also bear this in mind ! Nvidia have been using high amounts of VRAM in their game titles (the ones they've helped to support Gamedoesn'tworks) in order to force out settings on AMD cards. What I mean is, there are a few Gameworks titles out there that use more than 4gb of VRAM. Some say this is due to poor coding ETC. I say it's due to Nvidia wanting people to buy new cards. It was how they killed off my GTX 295s with BF3.

OK, so Vega as we know should have 8gb HBM2 IIRC. That means AMD could pull the same trick and get developers to use it all.

If that happens the 1060 will become a paperweight. And let's face it, it will happen. In just a few years we've gone from 256mb to up to 12 gigabytes.

And at each interchange we've scoffed and laughed and said "Well I could never use all of that VRAM !" and each time we've been left behind. I know some argue on here that 4gb is enough but I beg to differ. I have seen four clear examples of a card running out of VRAM and it's really, really ugly.

This new VRAM use occurred when we went from the Xbox 360 and PS3 to the new consoles which, bingo bongo ! have 6gb VRAM available to them for 1080p. The other 2gb is for the system, IIRC. However, there are now more new consoles coming so fully expect the VRAM level to rise and games to want more of it.

 

[saffer05]

Thanks for the input, guys. Also, kudos to you, tinytomlogan, for keeping in touch with the little people.

At the risk of sounding like a 12 year old, my birthday's on the third, and my girlfriend's dropped me some not-so-subtle hints regarding 'those new graphics cards' I was talking about. So unfortunately I do feel as though I'm running against the clock here.

After reading what Alien said regarding Sapphire and AMD I found a video review of the Sapphire RX 480 8GB Nitro+ OC edition, and, in addition to making fantastic use of Vulkan as well as DX 12, I feel that with Sapphire's supposed high quality, the 480's Crossfire compatibility, and the highly competitive price, that the 480 is the better choice for the here-and-now, as well as the future.

That said, I'm all about those informed decisions, so if any of you awesome people have a compelling reason not to go with the 480, I'd love to hear it.

 

[Tolemac]

I own an old generation Sapphire R9 290X Vapor X and can honestly say that Sapphire are one of the best at making aftermarket AMD cards "they don't make Nvidia" ' I also have a Sapphire HD7770 in my mrs rig and thats 5 years old but still going strong as is my VaporX. I have no issues running Doom @ 2560 x 1440p at ultra settings. Tbh i'm tempted to buy the 8gb R9 290X Vapor X I saw on e-bay and skip Vega altogether. The Sapphire 480 is cheaper than the Asus strix version but I would wait until more reviews of the aftermarket cards are out i.e Powercolor Devil

 

[NeverBackDown]

AFAIK there are only 2 reviews live ATM on the Nitro+ 480. And in both reviews they come to roughly the same conclusion, the Nitro 480 is the card you should be looking at over a 1060. It's cheaper and faster than a stock/small OC 1060. But the 1060 does get ahead with a good OC, however for the price increase, it's simply not worth the money. Especially if on budget and you opt for a 4GB Nitro, there's no contest at all, the value is just far to great over a 1060. But honestly the 8GB is not much more, so I'd get that.

And they both said for modern APIs, the 480 is easily the king. And should be watched and considered heavily in your purchase decision as more games move toward them.

 

[saffer05]

AFAIK there are only 2 reviews live ATM on the Nitro+ 480. And in both reviews they come to roughly the same conclusion, the Nitro 480 is the card you should be looking at over a 1060. It's cheaper and faster than a stock/small OC 1060. But the 1060 does get ahead with a good OC, however for the price increase, it's simply not worth the money. Especially if on budget and you opt for a 4GB Nitro, there's no contest at all, the value is just far to great over a 1060. But honestly the 8GB is not much more, so I'd get that.

And they both said for modern APIs, the 480 is easily the king. And should be watched and considered heavily in your purchase decision as more games move toward them.

Noticing that you're an 'AMD enthusiast', what do you do when a game has a beautiful feature like well implemented PhysX in it? Is there a way AMD products can take advantage of this feature as well?

 

[NeverBackDown]

Noticing that you're an 'AMD enthusiast', what do you do when a game has a beautiful feature like well implemented PhysX in it? Is there a way AMD products can take advantage of this feature as well?

Well not many games have it, but yes you can still use it. It will just run on the CPU, you will take a performance hit greater than a Nvidia card doing it. I personally don't use it. Most of the games these days already have good physics built into the engine, so that explains its low adoption amongst games. Although the series of Batman heavily uses it, and is the only handful of games off the top of my head the makes it very worth using.

 

[saffer05]

So I watched this and now I'm seriously considering the 480, despite the 1060 getting notably better results in games I enjoy, like The Witcher 3, Fallout 4, and GTA 5.

Wouldn't it be fair to assume Nvidia would pull a trick out of their hat with their drivers either preemptively or in response to AMD's awesome performance gains when utilising DX12 or Vulcan?

I like Nvidia's control panel for its colour adjustments and I enjoy Shadowplay as well, but frame rate comes first for me and I'd feel pretty stupid if I chose the card that runs current games well but ages terribly compared to its direct counterpart which could possibly get better with age.

 

[Kushiro]

AMDs arch will has better innate performance for DX12 as it suports async compute whereas nVidia is using a soft implementaition since Pascal is essentially Maxwell just on a new process just as polaris is for AMDs side

Theres nothing wrong with going for the 1060 tbh. It performs OK under DX12 not like a 50% drop or anything. With the 1060 you can likely OC for more performance as well.

No sli and poorer DX12 for the 1060, but your do get better performance over the RX480 in general especially OC'd (luck).

Just go for whichever is cheaper tbh. Do you really need Shadowplay etc? nVidia Pascal DX12 potential is less than AMDs, not tricks to pull. Mind you that is potential, its up to them to utilize it.

 

[AlienALX]

So I watched this and now I'm seriously considering the 480, despite the 1060 getting notably better results in games I enjoy, like The Witcher 3, Fallout 4, and GTA 5.

Wouldn't it be fair to assume Nvidia would pull a trick out of their hat with their drivers either preemptively or in response to AMD's awesome performance gains when utilising DX12 or Vulcan?

I like Nvidia's control panel for its colour adjustments and I enjoy Shadowplay as well, but frame rate comes first for me and I'd feel pretty stupid if I chose the card that runs current games well but ages terribly compared to its direct counterpart which could possibly get better with age.

There is nothing Nvidia can pull from anywhere because put simply their cards do not support Async compute and never will.

For many years AMD have been throwing the kitchen sink at the problem, vaguely hoping that one day software will support their titanic cores whilst Nvidia has been making cut down GPUs that run at massive clock speeds. Now this has worked really well for Nvidia, as AMD have been using their GCN tech for years and because of it clock speeds have suffered. However, when push comes to shove and you actually fully support the feature set of AMD cards? they are better.

I'm pretty sure that the AMD CCN supports colour adjustment, so don't worry too much about that. There is an AMD version of Shadowplay too.

However, what you should be worried about is performance into the future. And on that AMD have got it nailed.

 

[The_Governour]

I would say that the RX 480 8gb would be the way to go, just after seeing Tom`s CF strix review then I think its a great buy.

Nvidia has been raping our wallets too long and in the long run then I think that the RX 480 will pull ahead. If you have various Pc`s then doing a CF to get 1080 performance (depending on games) is great and then later on you can allways Sell or place the other Rx 480 in your second or third Pc.

Rx 480 for the long run.

 

[Kushiro]

The RX 480 would be plenty for 1080p though

Jokes aside, I would compare RX480 CF more to the 1070 rather than the GTX 1080.

 

[NeverBackDown]

If you're playing at 1080p, the 480 is the better buy. It's cheaper and both it and the 1060 will dominate 1080p games. So mine as well save a little.

 

[Divenity]

I'd feel pretty stupid if I chose the card that runs current games well but ages terribly compared to its direct counterpart which could possibly get better with age.

This is why the 1060 and 480 are good choices anyways... They are cheap and will run everything just fine for the next couple years regardless of DX11 or 12, or Vulkan... In a couple years we will see what direction the market goes - if most game developers end up supporting the company's method you didn't go for, by the time it matters you're due for an upgrade anyways and it doesn't matter.

 

[guskline]

Just built a 6700k rig with a Sapphire RX480. Great card for 1080p

 

[AlienALX]

Just built a 6700k rig with a Sapphire RX480. Great card for 1080p

I've so nearly bought one of those for my spare rig so many times

Lovely little cards