1060 or 480 what card should suit me better?

ExcessiveZero

Hey fellow Polycounters, since my old card blew a fuse last week and am currently running on my ancient 8800gt while I am now looking at a new card for the end of the month.

I am not the most tech savy graphics geek in the world while I build my own systems so I don't know quite what to go for being split between these two. Many of the benchmarks are setup for the latest games, I am not honestly that interested in playing the latest doom on 20 monitors in 4k res.

Just trying to figure out the best card for me and my graphics work, such as good substance painter preformance, and around a 3 multimonitor system setup, I am tending to lean towards the 1060 as it runs at a lower temp and the things I have heard about the power draw kind of scares me with the 480 but I have gone back and forth on this decision.

so polycounters hopefully you can steer me the right way a little on this upgrade.

Farfarer

The 480 is a beast when it comes to power draw and heat output. The fans are loud when it gets cooking.

I'd go for the 1060, personally. The 480 is pretty outdated these days and, while it's the top of it's range, the 1060 will likely serve you better for longer (as well as run cooler, quieter and I imagine would generally outperform the 480).

JedTheKrampus

@Farfarer Are you perhaps thinking of the Geforce GTX 480? The Radeon RX 480 from AMD is about the same as Maxwell in performance per watt and isn't necessarily a bad choice.

Between those two I'd probably go for the GTX 1060 because there are a lot of OpenGL game art programs out there that aren't getting GCN optimization updates soon (like Mudbox for instance), and OpenGL tends to run a little better on Nvidia cards. If you're planning on doing some serious rendering engineering though, I'd go for the RX 480 because GCN has better documentation, works better with DX12 and Vulkan, and is a similar architecture to every console that will be made for the foreseeable future. Or, if you need that extra 2 gb of VRAM for Substance Painter you should probably go for the RX 480. Just my 2c

Farfarer

Well that's embarassing, yeah, I was on about NVidia's 480. You'd think they could devise some more unique names for these things...

monster

AMD processors I love, but graphics cards always give me problems. I recommend Nvidia always.
As a side note, since your current graphics card is so old, you should double check your motherboard can support the upgrade.

@Farfarer  I also thought this was about the Geforce, since it's still an upgrade from the mentioned 8800GT.

PolyHertz

Substance Painter afaik is built with NVIDIA cards in mind first, so you might experience some AMD specific bugs if you go with the RX480. It does however have more vram, which can be very useful if you're painting 4k textures.

ExcessiveZero

monster said:

AMD processors I love, but graphics cards always give me problems. I recommend Nvidia always.
As a side note, since your current graphics card is so old, you should double check your motherboard can support the upgrade.

@Farfarer  I also thought this was about the Geforce, since it's still an upgrade from the mentioned 8800GT.

lol well the 8800gt isn't what went boom just what I had lying round to stuff in my computer, sorry should have been more specific on the  RX 480 (amd) and the Nvidia 1060

kolayamit

I would recommend GTX 1060 6GB simply because of better drivers. How ever the RX 480 has better hardware, 2304 stream processors vs 1280 cuda cores and 192 bit vs 256 bit.