I would take that with a pinch of salt.

The 480 may officially be a 269 € card, but I've only seen one manufacturer selling at that point, with all the others going for 299 €. The GTX 1060 will allegedly launch at 319 € in the F.E. variant, but you'll have troubles finding it at that price, moreso at the suggested retail price.

Is that because they are games developed and designed for Dx11?

With upcoming games designed primarily for DX12 it will be the opposite instead, there will be some performance advantages, right? Compute something or what was it? Run CPU tasks on the GPU (although that wouldn't help CPU bound games)? Or have I just drunk some kool-aid. Please elaborate lol.

Isn't it common knowledge that higher resolutions use a bigger framebuffer and more video RAM?

I have a clear image in my head that I read of a game needing over 6GB in a game test recently, played in a very high res, prolly 4K.

First of all, after writing that I was told that this wasn't true and that performance improved when moving from DX11 to DX12. That is true in some cases, but not in others:

http://www.guru3d.com/articles-pages/hitman-2016-pc-graphics-performance-benchmark-review.html

1080p DX11

1080p DX12

Now, regarding your question. The problem we have is that there aren't many DX12 games available, and even less DX12 only games. But I would say that it's more a case of devs/publishers willing to invest in making proper DX12 modes versus others that only the bare minimum to be able to use the DX12 tag as a selling point.

Part of the benefits of DX12 is to avoid CPU bottlenecks (that Mantle's primary task, and DX12 & Vulkan come in one way or the other from it), but also brings new techs and tricks, one of them being Asynchronous Computing or A-Sync Compute where AMD's GCN hardware excels. But that is only part of DX12.

Honestly, I don't know how long it will take until DX12 is the base API for the upcoming games. If it was in MSoft's hands, it would have happened one year ago, but that's not how it works. In my opinion, I'd say that DX11 will still be the main platform the next three or four years, because the market is still dominated by DX11 capable cards.

Thanks a lot.

Oh yeah, asynchronous compute was the buzzword thrown around so much. Problem is I don't know what it is.

The thingy avoiding CPU bottlenecks in DX12, when that was announced I remember I thought it was totally useless and even counterproductive a couple years ago, because in the modern era nearly all games have been so clearly bottlenecked by the GPU, except for strategy games, simulation and sim-hybrids like Skyrim. But since then I've realized that CPU technology has lagged behind so much in recent years that today some even pure action games have become largely CPU dependent. Games still don't require much CPU tasks, but the graphics cards have improved so fast and the graphics engines with them that even the newest CPUs have a tough time to keep up. We just have to transfer some tasks over to the GPU.

Another thing I would like to understand better, is why CPU performance only increases by, what is it, like 25% every two years when GPU improvement is still fairly close to Moore's Law (double transistors every two years, which typically translates to perhaps 1.5-1.7x in raw performance).

I assume it has something to do with specialization versus parallellism for sure, but I wonder if there's other factors too.

Thoughts anybody?

Lack of competition.

Intel doesn't have real competition is the desktop market, but ARM is pushing hard in the low power segments. That made Intel focus mostly on lowering the power consumption of their chips and not so much in makeing them as powerful as they could. That brought to this situation.

Hopefully, Zen will bring some competition in the desktop market and push things forward. Again.

Also, some games are really CPU dependent. Fallout 4, Skyrim, Doom, GTA V and more.

The 1060 does not support SLI. I think that this already kills any value it could had against the RX 480.

Yeah. That's what I just said. Traditionally, games with lots of simulation going on have been CPU dependent, like Bethesda's RPGs, and strategy games of course, while you could count on that pure shooters and other action games were heavily GPU dependent. But today it's not that simple. All of a sudden we're seeing lots of "simple" action games being CPU-dependent. The new Doom is a great example of the new trend we have begun to see! And the main explanation is that CPUs have simply lagged behind in raw power relative to the GPU to the point that it becomes a bottleneck, it's not that Doom is designed with complex world simulation running in the background, which are typical CPU-tasks.

Interesting about ARM and the focus on lower power use by Intel. Low CPU power use really has been used as an important selling point by hardware companies in the last decade. It's funny that we see AMD and others adapt to that by changing GPU architecture in order to take over many traditional CPU tasks since these low power CPU's can't handle them anymore, instead of increasing the power use of CPUs! It's really instilled into people that a CPU is not supposed to draw a lot of power.

I'd go for one GTX 1070 / RX 490 instead of two GTX 1060 / RX 480 even if the average fps are a bit lower. Microstutter, worse frametimes, missing or late SLI/CF profiles and similar problems aren't worth it IMHO.

Two middleclass cards instead of one faster model also often produce more heat and noise, are less efficient and draw more power.

Of course, a single, most powerful GPU is always a better option. I'm not a big advocate of SLI/CF since I think it brings more problems than it fix. Unless you are going for high resolutions and will need it.

However, I think that it is important to tell people of this limitation, since some are considering a 1060 for a SLI.