Help me choose a GPU

[Yo Whats Up]

So, the time for me to buy a gpu has come, I'm a few clicks away from that, now the only remaining question is, which card do I get? I've narrowed it down to two choices, don't ask about it, and they are the sapphire nitro+ rx 470 8gb and the sapphire nitro+ rx 480 4gb, I have a 1080p 60hz IPS no freesync monitor and I won't be upgrading my monitor anytime soon, not before I get a better gpu if I want 1440p or 144hz for 1080p. I'm also using a i7-4770k at 4.3ghz and ddr3-1600 ram. The cards are the exact same price, which one should I get? The 470 runs at 8ghz memory clock while the 480 runs at 7ghz, also memory bandwidth is 256 gb/s for the 470 and 224 gb/s for the 480. Core clock boost is 1260 mhz for the 470 and 1306 mhz for the 480. Also the 480 has 2304 shading units vs 2048, 36 vs 32 compute units and 144 TMUs vs 128, so the 470 has double the vram, higher memory bandwidth and higher memory clock while the 480 wins in the other stuff. Otherwise they're supposed to be exactly the same, coolers and all the other fancy stuff from sapphire, but perhaps the 480 will be a slightly better chip oc-wise cuz of the higher stock core clock, or maybe the 470 chip is better but it hasn't been pushed to the max when testing in the manufacturing, also possible? I don't know. I also have no idea how much the specs matter and their actual performance. Will I ever use more than 4 gigs of vram at 1080p and actually suffer performance loss because of lack of vram on the 480, assuming I'm not playing mirror's edge catalyst on hyper settings? And is the 480 even faster the 470? Like do the higher shading units and other stuff give me more fps than the higher memory clock and memory bandwidth? Also I suppose the 470 with its 8 gigs vram will have a slightly higher resell price in the future when games will use more vram, even if the cards themselves will be too weak to handle the games anyway but at least you can use higher textures? I mean it's not like I'm gonna be using the card for that long before selling it, probably gonna sell it as soon as the volta/ampere/turing custom cards come out, with some extra money to fill the difference if there is one, cuz I'm gonna sell it before the cards come out so that I won't lose any value, cuz obviously as soon as the new cards come out the old cards will be devalued because you can now buy new cards for the same relative price cost which will have higher performance. I've asked this question on a few forums like reddit and stuff and the comments are always split 50/50 with 2 general answers and different variations of them -   "the 480 won't run any games that the 470 can't, if you're lacking vram you'll most likely be lacking processing power anyway, get the 480, you don't need more than 4gb vram for 1080p" and "you'll need more vram in the future, vram will become more and more of a bottleneck, get the 470" also some guy said that with his 290x 8gb he can play wolfstein 2 with max textures but with fury he can't. I've gotten no definitive answers though so I'm always left wondering "which one is faster? If the 480 is faster, will I need the extra vram? How much faster is the 480 if it is? 1-2%? 5%? 10%? Which card will sell more?" etc. etc. Just general responses without much evidence leaving me to wonder which response makes the most sense and hoping my logic is correct, cuz the benchmarks and statistics are lacking so that's all I'm left with. I guess I might flip a coin in the end

[Jurrunio]

480 8GB is better. I would rather crank up other stuff like lightings or shadows settings rather than texture settings at 1080p.

[TheGlenlivet]

6 minutes ago, Yo Whats Up said:

Snip

 

Get the 8GB.  You can OC it to the same speed as the other 480, and yes, you'll want all that VRAM one day.  Better to have it and not need it, then to need it and not have it.

[Yo Whats Up]

2 minutes ago, Jurrunio said:

480 8GB is better. I would rather crank up other stuff like lightings or shadows settings rather than texture settings at 1080p.

I mean it's clear the 480 8gb is better than either, unless it was a typo?

[Jurrunio]

1 minute ago, Yo Whats Up said:

I mean it's clear the 480 8gb is better than either, unless it was a typo?

Oh I meant 480 4gb

[xriqn]

14 minutes ago, Jurrunio said:

480 8GB is better. I would rather crank up other stuff like lightings or shadows settings rather than texture settings at 1080p.

Are you serious? They are practically identical, you're just saying the 480 is better because the number is higher and the performance is MARGINALLY better, so much better that you'd barely notice the difference. I'd recommend the 470 8gb because it's cheaper and the performance difference between the 470 and 480 isn't even noticeable.

[stealth80]

23 minutes ago, Yo Whats Up said:

So, the time for me to buy a gpu has come......... and they are the sapphire nitro+ rx 470 8gb and the sapphire nitro+ rx 480 4gb, I have a 1080p 60hz IPS no freesync monitor and I won't be upgrading my monitor anytime soon, not before I get a better gpu if I want 1440p or 144hz for 1080p.

480 4gb - 8gb would be even better, or even a 580 if you can find one the same price

[Jurrunio]

2 minutes ago, xriqn said:

Are you serious? They are practically identical, you're just saying the 480 is better because the number is higher and the performance is MARGINALLY better, so much better that you'd barely notice the difference. I'd recommend the 470 8gb because it's cheaper and the performance difference between the 470 and 480 isn't even noticeable.

I edited my post, and OP said they are the same price.

[Blatcher2]

53 minutes ago, Yo Whats Up said:

I've narrowed it down to two choices, don't ask about it, and they are the sapphire nitro+ rx 470 8gb and the sapphire nitro+ rx 480 4gb, I have a 1080p 60hz IPS

480 4GB is easily the best choice. Same price and 4GB will serve you fine for 1080 60p. Some games might require you to turn texture quality down from ultra to high but the VAST majority of games won't need more than 4GB even on ultra textures. 

 

Instead of wasting money on VRAM (which people tend to reccomend a lot) take the extra 12.5% performance of the 480 and overclock for more free performance. 

 

Also Crypto currencies are at the profitability threshold so if you want to pick up some used cards, the market will soon be flooded with them.

[Yo Whats Up]

8 minutes ago, Blatcher2 said:

take the extra 12.5% performance of the 480

Where do you get this number from, when comparing these 2 specific models?

[Blatcher2]

1 hour ago, Yo Whats Up said:

Where do you get this number from, when comparing these 2 specific models?

These are the same Polaris 10 chips. They have the same architecture and thus perform virtually identically on a per core basis normalizing clock speed. Its not as complicated as many people think.

Within the same architecture Cores (shaders) correlates directly wither performance. 2304 / 2048 = 12.5%. 

 

Also google Rx 4xx benchmark / review and you can find pretty much any popular game. For example, I google "470 review tomshardware" (not hard) and you can see detailed graphs showing the FPS in different games. 

 

In BF4 for example there is s 13.5% difference in FPS.

[SteveGrabowski0]

I'd go RX 480 4GB all day. 4GB is still really solid for 1080p and the RX 470 is cutdown a bit from the RX 480.

[Yo Whats Up]

11 hours ago, Blatcher2 said:

These are the same Polaris 10 chips. They have the same architecture and thus perform virtually identically on a per core basis normalizing clock speed. Its not as complicated as many people think.

Within the same architecture Cores (shaders) correlates directly wither performance. 2304 / 2048 = 12.5%. 

 

Also google Rx 4xx benchmark / review and you can find pretty much any popular game. For example, I google "470 review tomshardware" (not hard) and you can see detailed graphs showing the FPS in different games. 

 

In BF4 for example there is s 13.5% difference in FPS.

 

That's all nice and cool but in this particular benchmark the 470 has a memory clock of 6600 mhz while the 480 runs at 8000 mhz, while in my case the 470 has 8000 mhz and the 480 has 7000 mhz. If I had to guess I'd say the cores/shaders are slightly more important than the memory clock and bandwidth speed because it just makes sense they would be, but I have no actual evidence, if I'm correct  the performance difference should be around or less than 5% for the 480. Some guy said that the 470 can be oc-ed to the same level as the 480, but how can you be so sure? Like I said shouldn't the 480 be a slightly better chip on average than the 470 one since the former was tested for a maximum of 1306 mhz core clock while the latter was tested for only 1260? For maximum overclock they should be pretty close on average, not more than a few dozen mhz difference but why would the 470 chip be able to overclock as much/more than the 480 one, on average? I'm kinda inclined to the 470 right now if the performance difference is 5% or less but I get double the vram, if anything the resell price should be slightly higher for the 470 and like I said I'm not gonna keep this card for long

[Blatcher2]

1 hour ago, Yo Whats Up said:

if I'm correct  the performance difference should be around or less than 5% for the 480.

What? Bro I'm sorry but I think you need to re read my response again. I didn't just give you a specific example, I gave you a way to go and do research so go do it. Why do you think memory clocks matter so much dude... they really don't (based on 5 years of overclocking >10 different GPUs). Most 480s can easily OC to 8 Ghzz effective on the memory

 

btw since the memory bus is 256 bit on both cards the bandwidth speed and memory clock are measuring the same thing so stop worrying about bandwidth speed since that is a result of whatever you set the memory clock to

 

1 hour ago, Yo Whats Up said:

If I had to guess I'd say the cores/shaders are slightly more important than the memory clock and bandwidth speed

You don't have to guess. Told you here. Memory overclocking can result in modest gains in some games though shades and cores are FAR more significant

 

 

edit: Just incase you struggle doing research I might as well tell you that  in general the 480 is about 10-15% faster but it depends on drivers, optimizations and other factors so make sure to look up reviews covering games you care about and..... Welcome to the PC Master Race ?