Hardware advice VGA

I tried to look up 2x270 performance in the Metaverse benchmark section but the Filter is not working for me at the moment.

If you can afford it then go for the 1060/480. The 1060 is the faster of the two, so if price is similar go for that. If you go for the 480 get the 4GB version, it is much better value for money than the 8GB version as it isn't really  fast enough to take advantage of 8GB (unless CF). If price is a strong consideration and you can find a nicely priced 470 then that is also worth a look as it is only a little slower than the 480 in most cases. For any of them you don't want to be buying the reference/founders edition, they run hotter and louder.

There is also a slower 1060 with only 3GB of VRAM but I haven't looked into it so don't know how much performance it loses, probably still a very good card but I think any new card should have 4GB VRAM ideally.(OK just looked it up, if you don't push textures super high it is a very nice card but on some games it hits a VRAM ceiling if you put textures up very high which can hurt performance quite a bit. But good card if you keep that in mind. Though remember Ashes' Devs recommend 4GB VRAM. If you exclusively play 1v1 though perhaps less of a consideration?)

Any of those should last you a fair few years gaming at 1080p. The problem with even 2x270s is that you will still only have 2GB of VRAM. You also have the problem going forward that many games don't have good support for 2 cards, in some cases 0 support. So though you will be spending less you may be upgrading again sooner than you think.

I'd go for a stronger single card every time, and I don't think 2GB of VRAM is enough for Ashes.

If Ashes is your main concern here is a comparison video with the RX 470 4GB vs RX 480 8GB vs GTX 1060 6GB vs GTX 970 4GB

The link should jump to the right place but if it doesn't you can jump to it by clicking the appropriate link in the description

https://youtu.be/CNNRGH3gMvg?t=239

(obviously that is a powerful CPU too so own performance may vary)

I would say a 480 is the way to go for DX12/Vulkan titles, it is more future proof in that regard.

Whatever you do, do NOT get the 3GB version of the 1060, they gimped it too much!

I have explored the options for RX 480 and even tried for some time 1060 - the problem is that the current pricing is kind of bad, at least for (eastern) Europe and they are both grossly overpriced IMO. A decent 480/1080 - MSI/Strix is close to 350 Euro and hardly worth it. I am very much interested in any information about dual (cheap) gpu tests - any info on that?

If you are truly budget oriented then going by the video I showed above the 470 is still a good option. But really it all depends on local pricing. In the UK the place which sells them at their cheapest is overclockers.co.uk. Cheapest non-reference 470 £169 (€200); cheapest non-reference 480 4GB  £199 (€237); and cheapest 1060 6GB £235 (€280).

I mention all those prices as I know some mainland Europeans do buy from overclockers. You'd have to look up postage costs etc. and decide if it is worth it.

2x270, it is an option, but the VRAM limit is a serious consideration, not to mention it is a essentially a re-brand of the 7870 which came out in 2012, so the architecture is already 4 years old. We had a 270x 4GB card here for a while actually, then went to a friend, it is a good card. If yours was the 4GB version then CrossFire would make more sense. Anyway, for the smaller maps for 1v1 I expect 2x270 would work well for now if you went for that option. 

(If a dev reads this, the benchmark database is still not working for me now, though did briefly last night, odd)

Personally, Multi GPU works wonders for me in that game. Giving an additional 50-60+% performance. But, i have 2 Gigabyte HD7950 3Gb and if i go higher then the ''High'' graphics presets, it get's kinda slow... GPU-Z show that all of my 3Gb of GPU memory get's used (and then some...) so if you have the 2Gb variant of 270\7850 and you like higher presets\high resolution, i would look for a nice used card on ebay (290\290X\390\390X\Fury\whatever with AT LEAST 4Gb of Video Ram!) as the game runs Multi GPU in AFR mode. SFR mode would be better, i think, for our low end cards as it would split the memory load in half! (Like i see in Civilization Beyond Earth) Also, note that my PC (Intel Xeon [email protected] Hyperthreading ON (12 Threads) with 24Gb of DDR3@1750) tends to get slow when there is a whole lot of action on the screen... CPU\Memory is limiting my performance in AotS!