Polaris is not a serious threat to Nvidia. The GTX 1060 is significantly faster than the RX480 at a similar retail price; the GTX 1060 is considerably more expensive than the 960 was at launch and I expect that Nvidia have retained good margins. The RX480 seriously missed AMD's efficiency targets, hence the PCIe power fiasco. AMD have nothing to compete at the high end and have no serious HPC offering; with PC sales shrinking year-on-year, HPC is a crucial driver of growth.
Polaris is just barely enough to keep AMD in contention. As with their CPU range, AMD are relegated to a value-oriented offering for the low to mid market. This isn't a good place to be. Nvidia can afford to squeeze AMD's margins, because they have a monopoly on the more profitable high end. AMD are also being threatened from below by Intel's increasingly powerful iGPUs.
>The GTX 1060 is significantly faster than the RX480 at a similar retail price
Not from what I saw. Slightly faster or equal in DX11, slightly slower or equal in DX12/Vulkan.
And not price-comparable either, there is a $50 difference. If you are pointing to the EVGA etc, note that they have a single fan and as such are going to throttle quickly.
For a good price comparison I suspect we will need to wait for the rumoured 1050Ti, which should be actually price comparable to a 4GB RX-480.
Personally, if I was building a upper-midrange gaming PC right now, that marginal $50 would go to a bigger SSD, not to buy a 1060 over a 480.
Polaris is just barely enough to keep AMD in contention. As with their CPU range, AMD are relegated to a value-oriented offering for the low to mid market. This isn't a good place to be. Nvidia can afford to squeeze AMD's margins, because they have a monopoly on the more profitable high end. AMD are also being threatened from below by Intel's increasingly powerful iGPUs.