Why get a RX480 for Vulkan when 99,99% of the other Games on the market run better on a GTX 1070. Maybe 3 years from now it's 5 Games that support Vulkan... not worth it
If your budget stretches to a GTX1070 I would 100% recommend that for 1080p and 1440p over anything AMD has at the moment.(AMD has not upgraded there higher end GPU yet) as it is good a 1440p if future AAA games require more GPU grunt you will be able to drop to 1080p so I would say more future proof. If you want to spend less then a GTX1060 or a 480 would be really good for solid 1080p gaming but they are Mid range so may not be enough for future 2017/18 AAA games only time will tell
No decent studio will make a game you can't play very nicely on 1070. If you can get one of those, you should without worries. If you need to stay within your original budget, then you might need to weigh between 480 and 1060. Between those two I'd choose 480 for the sake of dx12 and vulkan, but I doubt you'd feel sorry with 1060 either especially if Nvidia is your thing. However, despite some strange opinions here about an SSD, that's what you need even more than a new GPU. There's simply no going back after getting used to it. When you double click an icon, the program needs to appear immediately before your eyes, no after such a long time you double click for a second time thinking you failed to click properly initially. If someone belittles SSDs, it suggest that person doesn't have one themselves, they are running some weird Kingston or whatever, or their PC is otherwise so compromised the reality is masked from them. Fortunately SSDs are affordable already, so it shouldn't affect your plans that much.
I agree SSD is a huge upgrade from a mechanical drive I went from 10000rpm raptors in raid 0 to SSD and was so impressed I now only have SSD's in my system I use mechanical drives in a USB caddie for backups
With Windows 8.x and 10, the system doesn't actually shutdown when you select the "shutdown" option. Which is why both my laptop and desktop can appear to "boot up" so quickly. Because of this, the "boot time" argument is invalidated. The only reason to disable Fast Boot is for hardware changes. Also, an SSD is far from being "the most significant upgrade you can do"....or being "essential".... An SSD does not improve overall system performance. It simply lessens a single bottleneck. If you're getting say, 30fps, in BF4...switching from a mechanical harddrive to an SSD is not going to improve the situation.... However, a faster CPU or GPU will. The laptop I use at work has a 500GB 5400rpm Seagate drive. My desktop has an ADATA SP550 240GB, my laptops at home have a Crucial M4 256GB and a PNY CS1311 240GB. My media center has a Crucial M4 64GB. I also have an ADATA SP550 120GB and a SanDisk 240GB. I'm not lacking on SSDs....lol I buy them because the local BestBuy always has them on sale cheaper than any other drive.
Yeah, I made a mistake of mentioning the boot time specifically. In the end it's only a single instance when you start using the computer. But after that SSDs make a difference in a whole lot of things. Of course it doesn't raise the FPS in games, but it makes load times far more tolerable, often so much so that you don't have time to fully read the texts in load screens. Back when nearly everybody wasn't running an SSD yet, some gameplay videos on Youtube made you check why the video had entered a pause on its own before you realised the video author hadn't cut the absurdly long HDD load screen wait away. If you only play some competitive MP game and load a single map in the evening, it doesn't matter so much in gaming, of course, albeit it would still matter in everything else you possibly do with the computer. On the other hand the OP is not going to spend his whole budget on multiple SSDs, I reckon, so it's just something he should get as well to have a modern computer.
