Loll just remember to always wait for the benchmarks! I am sure the 1060 will beat 480 in most games but most games these days that are being benchmarked is in dx11 so if you want to buy a card which will last you for a very long time, certainly keep an eye out for dx12 benchmarks as well. As console developers continue to use Async and dx12 on their games, it only benefits AMD cards more compared to Nvidia's but Pascal does have some dx12 improvements. It will be an interesting fight to say the least!

Iirc, the gap between the 480 and the 1070 and 1080 still decreases when going from DX11 to DX12 (as in, AMD sees bigger performance gains).

Indeed and the larger memory size will help aswell. 3GB on the 1060 vs 8GB on the RX 480 is a massive difference. But who knows, perhaps the 1060 will turn out to be a overclocking monster.

The 1060 is 6gb. I know there is this rumour that it will have 3gb/6gb varients but Nvidia announced only 6gb one. 

And, correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't 6 Gb, like... sufficient for a card at this powerlevel?

Yea it certainly is! You will almost always hit a performance bottleneck before you hit a Vram bottleneck unless we later find Nvidia did some stupid shady Vram nonsense again. But I doubt they want to go through that media rape again loll. 

Having the extra 2gb is nice but if the 1060 beats the 480 in both dx11 and dx12, the vram shouldn't matter to you at that point.

iirc, Pascal doesn't perform better in DX 12 than Maxwell. Pascal cards are more powerful and that also makes them more powerful in DX12, but the performance drop when switching from DX11 to DX12 for both families is pretty much the same.

And AMD cards don't gain when running DX12 games, they simply loss less performance than Nvidia cards. The same game run in DX 11 and DX 12 will run faster on DX 11, whether you're using an AMD or Nvidia card.

And it's worth keeping in mind that DX12 won't take over the PC gaming echosystem overnight, DX 11 will still be a thing for many, many years. Just look at DX9, which is still used nowadays. 

I'm not saying that you should choose a GPU looking only at today's games/performance, but you should be realistic. If you're thinking about replacing your card in 2-3 years, thinking about DX12 is pretty much useless.

how does it compare to a gtx 980ti ?

Ehhhh??? They don't lose performance when switching from dx11 to dx12. At least not with properly optimized dx12 games and AMD...

And while I agree that dx12 won't take everything over overnight, I don't think it will take that long for dx12 to be used in more games. Virtually all games shown in MS press conference will certainly use dx12 which is quite a lot already. And those will start releasing from the Fall of this year. Then you have games from EA and SE using dx12. Dolphin and the wiiU emulators have upgraded to direct x 12 and saw massive gains in performance. Unity has added Direct x 12 support and the list goes on. We also saw what happened with badly optimized dx12 only games such as Quantum Break where it was unplayable with Nvidia cards for the longest time and the performance was half of AMDs.

And its not like either of these cards will perform badly in dx11... So I think people should really think about it before upgrading to a new card.

Edit: Ubisoft will also support Direct x 12 and their first game will be WatchDogs 2.

Hmm. Green team comes back swinging.

Edit: What is this founder's edition nonsense again. Tsk tsk, Nvidia.