both are good choices, it is more about what you prefer ..green/red ... they did good job with latest drivers and in some games 480 is catching ..
who knows when dx12 dominance will happend, my bet is we gonna have new cars till it really does ..
worth mentioning is that 1060 consumes a lot less power and is running low temps (you almost game without fun running at 60 celsius in 1080p) ... AMD cars are hot and hunger
and another thing is nVidias Shadowplay .... if you are recording, you won`t find sw as little performance impacting as shadowplay (cuts what 2-3 FPS ? )
but if you run Freesync monitor AMD is doing it better than nV with Gsync
anyway OP won`t do mistake with any of those ..
My RX 480 runs 65 at 100% load. That's not hot. 60 degrees is not hot either. You won't even notice that, I don't understand how you can say "You almost game without fun at 60 celcius at 1080p", do you hold your hand on the card when you game or something?
These cards (both 1060 as well as RX 480) are designed to easily operate at 80+ degrees celcius. Having it cooler is nice ,but not when you are going for worse performance over 3-5 degrees. Both are 6 pin cards so you wont be running either off the motherboard alone. The RX 480 isn't catching, it's beating the 1060 with a few very heavily Nvidia focused games being the exception. Especially at higher resolutions (such as triple screens) the 8gb 480 will dominate the 1060 now and in due time. As for Shadowplay, AMD has ReLive, which is basically 100% identical to shadowplay, does exactly the same thing ,in the same way ,with the same (or rather lack of) performance hit.
Yes by the time everything is DX12 we will have new cards, but that doesn't mean OP or anybody who buys a videocard now will upgrade. That and AMD will have a permanent advantage in DX12 because of their architecture. Nvidia is unable to support advanced DX12 technologies like A-sync compute due to how their core architecture is written. Supporting those technologies would require Nvidia to re-write how CUDA cores work, and that wont happy any time soon. Yes OP can't go wrong buying either, but 1 is the better choice.
OP can't go wrong if he spends 300 on a new gen GPU either way. Isn't the whole point of giving advice to point out the little nuances that edge out 1 card over the other in value for money? I don't get the logic behind calling both good choices when 1 is faster, better for triples, better for dx12, more future proof and has all the features (except g-sync)?
Some good stuff here. I'm allowing it to sink in. My budget is around $1000. I have a Benq monitor (28" I think) that is of stellar quality. If I could get two more (1080p/60 Hz?) I'd be happy. That's going to eat up about $500, so I may have to up the budget to $1,500 total. A new console will cost roughly $600, but w/o triples (VR support for pCARS & Assetto so far), the xbox has too many disadvantages to continue. For instance, you spend $15 a months for Live membership, which can run $200 a year. The games are inferior to PC and cost $60 a pop. Sink that money into the PC upgrade and I don't see how you can go wrong.
I agree with you that PC is the obvious place to be for simracing, it's not even a competition. There are no sims that are on console and not on PC. Console basically gets a few of our sims (pCars, AC, Dirt Rally) but there is so much more on PC. And so much better support for Triples, VR, and peripherals alike.
Yea 500$ is cutting it pretty tight. Depending on if you have a rig to mount everything to or plan to use a desk also factors in your budget. For 1000$ you will definitely be able to build a PC that would smash any sim title out there. I think your main decision there would be a RX 480 + 7700K i7 , or a i5 7500 + 1070. Which performs better depends, I don't have any data on this but some sims (especially if you run high amounts of AI) will like the CPU over a better GPU. But for VR and some of the newer sim titles a better GPU might be the better choice.
