Now that both the AMD Radeon RX480 and the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 have been on the market for a while, and that they have been completely established, it’s time to write an article like this one for those users who want to upgrade their graphics card but don’t know which one to buy. Which of these two cards is a better option right now?
You already know that on this website we have analyzed both versions (RX480 and GTX1060), in both cases their “complete” models for lack of a better term (the 8GB version from AMD and the 6GB version form NVIDIA), so in terms of performance, we are able to give a verdict, and as we mentioned in said analysis the winner in this area is the GTX 1060 from NVIDIA, at least when the analysis was done.
However, that time we did it the exact same day of the launch, and thus we had to do it with controllers that weren’t finished at all. To this day AMD as well as NVIDIA have been updating their respective controllers and both cards deliver better performance. In this area right now we can’t get wet since the RX 480 is better in some cases (specially DX 12 games) and the GTX 1060 is better in others (mainly in all benchmarks, but not in games)
Both cards are very similar in terms in performance, and in this area we give them the same score since nobody, or almost nobody, buys a graphics card to play one specific game. What is clear is that both options are designed to deliver outstanding performance (and by this we mean stable 60 FPS with graphics on the highest setting) at Full HD resolution, as much as AMD and NVIDIA say that they are ideal for 1440p or even 4K. This is simply not true, and they know it as well as we do.
Therefore, and we insist that we are giving them the same score in terms of performance, we must consider other factors when choosing the winner. And of course, price must be considered. For this reason, we will put the lowest available prices we have found at online stores in Spain for both cards below:
- GTX 1060 3GB: 219$ (MSI Armor OCV1).
- GTX 1060 6GB: 239$ (EVGA SC Gaming).
- RX 480 4 GB: 230$ (Sapphire Nitro Plus).
- RX 480 8GB: 280$ (Sapphire).
As you can see, in terms of price they are also about the same, the RX 480 from AMD being a little bit cheaper even though it is true that the cheapest 8GB model has a reference heatsink, and the model from NVIDIA has a personalized one.
So, which card should I buy?
Whichever one you want, the one you like the most. The idea of this article is to stop the “AMD is better” or “NVIDIA is better” controversy. In the case of the RX 480 vs the GTX 1060 they are completely the same, in performance as well as in price, so what we would recommend is to buy a personalized model with a good heatsink, and, if possible, with a good factory OC to improve performance a bit.
Read More:
Best Mid-Range Graphics Cards Between 200 and 400 dollars
Nvidia GTX 1060 vs GTX 960 vs GTX 970 vs GTX 980 vs GTX 1070 vs AMD RX 480 vs R9 390
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 vs GTX 1070 vs GTX 1080 vs GTX TITAN X Pascal
Building a Cheap Gaming PC with a RX480