GTX 1060 vs RX 480?

Future proof yourself and go RX 480 8GB, either the MSI Gaming X or Sapphire Nitro ( MSI has better cooling by a ton ). 6 to 8 months from now you can laugh at the poor performance of the GTX 1060 in DX 12 and Vulkan titles as these two API's become mainstream.

There are a few Benchmarks out there that remove gameworks titles from their testing and rightfully so as Gameworks tanks AMD performance. Find those Benchmarks and watch closely to the CPU usage. The GTX 1060 rigs seem to show around 80%-100% cpu usage where as the AMD's tend to show 40-60%. Async makes your CPU not work as hard breathing life into it.

I went from my EVGA SSC GTX 970 to a MSI RX 480 8GB Gaming X and see pretty good improvements all though not ground breaking. The one area i see big improvements was in my CPU usage dropping giving me more overhead in that area ( i went from 80-90% CPU to 50% on i5 3570k OC 4.5 ) If anyone wants to breath life into a older CPU go AMD. Oh and a byproduct of this is lower CPU temps across the board. Double bonus!
 
Hello,
Avoid the Nitro+ 480 8GB, it's a really well built card, but its blower is not big enough for this OC. I had one, the GPU would go up to 76° during gaming, the blower would send hot air to the front of my case, warming up the cage of my HDDs... They would take 10° more during gaming as well 🙁
Also this card consumes +200W where my new 1060 uses only 105 at max.
The Nitro+ is really stretching to its limit the 480.

Now, it all depends the games you play. There are what... 2 or 3 games using Vulkan? No one knows how many will be out and/or when... I mainly play DX11 games, and the 1060 is faster with those games. Not by a great deal, but... As long as there are more than 60FPS, who cares, right? 480 or 1060, your eyes won't see a difference. But don't think years in advance. By the time DX12 is firmly there, both the 1060 and the 480 will have to be changed, they will once again be underpowered. Cycle of any GPU.

Get the card that's the cheapest between the 2, considering your games, and you'll be fine :)