Rx 480 OR Gtx970

RX 480 and 970 are similar. I would go with 480

It is newer and cheaper

rx 480 for sure

I'd say that for the 1080p gaming, i'd go for the cheaper one.
in the same price range (240-260$), GTX 1060 is better.

1060 is better when running NVIDIA GameWorks titles and in some DX 11 titles. Otherwise, it's really not. Tom's benchmark line up for the 1060 review is a total joke.

If you have specific games you know you're planning to play, look at how both cards run the game, then decide. Some go one way, some go the other way.

I just read a review in which they tried GTX970, RX 480, GTX1060 on some games, then averaged the FPS.
GTX 1060 was the best.
RX480 4GB was the best value for money in $
GTX 970 is still good enough to play games at very high settings and 1440p

Over the course of time, most AMD cards have gained 10 - 30% performance over their launch numbers in DX 11, while NVIDIA cards have not. It would seem, NVIDIA doesn't optimize drivers for a 1 generations old card anymore.

Some benchmark suite averages such as Tom's paint the GTX 1060 with a > 20% performance advantage over the RX 480, while some benchmark suite averages paint the 1060 with 5% above - 5% performance loss in comparison. It all depends on the games being run on the cards, and the settings used during those runs.

Under Vulkan and DX 12, which new games are now shipping with, AMD cards easily surpass the NVIDIA rivals, except in the case of the 1070 and 1080, simply due to NVIDIA's brute force approach.

When you also take into consideration the lost upgrade path of multi-GPU support with the 1060, and that G-Sync would cost another premium to buy into VS Free sync, which doesn't necessarily drive the cost of the screen up, the NVIDIA offering is even less competitively priced.

It just means that NVIDIA provides better optimized drivers on launch day. You have 1 example of Vulcan and 3 examples of DX 12. That's kinda not enough to say what will be the general performance. And not all DX 12 games will utilize the Async Compute that hurts Nvidia performance right now. And personally, I tried doom with vulkan and open GL. couldn't find any visual difference. Same goes true for DX 12. So as nvidia user i can always opt for older render path. Just like AMD users do with hairworks and other "gameworks" games.

Rx480. Manual oc rx480 can already get up to gtx 980 performance, and as what others have said, rx480 is future proof becuz of dx12 and vulkan.

Depends on where u live, if 1060 is cheaper then buy that instead

RX 480 any OC is at around 1400MHz.
That's far from 980 performance level.
RX is not more future proof (than it's real competition GTX 1060) as i have to see more DX 12 titles than 2 sponsored by AMD to conclude that nvidia is impotent with DX 12 titles. Same goes for Vulcan ... need to see more than 1 game.

NVIDIA is hardly impotent in DX 12. It simply gains very little. That points to the hardware usage in DX 11 and DX 12 not changing much. This is possibly because the hardware is already very well utilized to capacity under DX 11, leaving little to be gained, and it also speaks to the overhead of both vendors' DX 11 driver software. NVIDIA shows lower DX 11 driver overhead, AMD more.

If you can diminish the price difference between the GTX 1060 and RX 480 to similar levels as the performance difference, and have no plans to use G-Sync or multi-GPU, then I would say, sure, the 1060 is then a similar value.

At the moment, I really don't see much in the way of available RX 480 cards, so it's hardly in the running for much of anything other than waiting. Perhaps AIB vendors are saving their supply of silicon until their aftermarket cards are ready.

^ lol.
That's completelly true.
People screaming "AMD is the king of DX12/Vulcan" ... well ... the truth is that AMD really suck with DX11/OpenGL. So we do see those huge gains when their drivers play smaller role in DX12/Vulcan.

It's not just that AMD's driver overhead is minimized in DX 12 and Vulkan, there is also the benefit of the low level hardware schedulers that asynchronous compute workloads can be implemented to take advantage of. The extra hardware in AMD's forward thinking architecture has taken a long time to pay off, and well, I would say the cost still hasn't been recouped in terms of gaming benefits, but it looks like we are getting there slowly.

From my understanding, NVIDIA's Pascal cards support only a basic level of async compute, which is certainly better than nothing, and at least don't tank in the performance department like Maxwell cards did under asynchronous workloads. AMD on the other hand supports pretty much all aspects of it. A lot of the performance gains AMD is seeing is in the unused resources being better filled with work being tossed into those bubbles of unused resources. It's unfortunate that what we as end users have are simple generic benchmarks, and not the ability to test each card to see how much potential performance is being left on the table due to underutilized resources.

It may be that NVIDIA has a lot of unused resources under DX 11, and simply can't use them all that much better under DX 12. But, without tools to tell us, all we can do is speculate as to what's happening.

However, as the Time Spy benchmark from Futuremark has clearly pointed out, just because software is built from the ground up to be DX 12, doesn't mean it's going to tap into the compute power that's available on the AMD cards either.

And another good example is with DX 11 games such as the Rise of the Tomb Raider and even older games like the Gears of War remake, that get DX 12 bolted on or shoehorned in after release. When the DX 12 patch was released for Tomb Raider, it was actually advised for NVIDIA users to stick with the DX 11 render path, as they lost performance under DX 12, and that includes the Pascal series. Whether that situation has changed yet, I don't know. Gears of War was such a mess at release, it just didn't work right for a lot of AMD users. Now, however, it shines as an example of AMD cards going from worse than to better than equivalent NVIDIA cards.

As more titles are ported from consoles, AMD will have more wins. Until then, NVIDIA is great for DX 11 and OpenGL. They are also fine for DX 12, but don't expect any performance gains now, and especially in the future. NVIDIA has a history of doing far less for owners of previous generation cards than AMD.