Without actual sales figures, it's difficult to estimate how well these cards are selling. Personally, I wouldn't buy HD7970GE or GTX770 at $400 today. These prices are outrages for what essentially is a performance level of a January 2012 HD7970 @ 1.05-1.1ghz or a March 2012 GTX680 with a mild overclock. Buying 28nm tech for $400 with this level of performance is just as wasteful as spending $400-450 of your money on a GTX580 near the end of its life.
I wonder if for the next series NV will stay conservative and wait another 12 months to launch a 550mm2 Maxwell? If NV releases the large die Maxwell right away, then we'd be looking at 50%+ more performance over the 780 by possibly summer of 2014. That would be spectacular.
If AMD has something to put out that warrants the larger die going into an 880, then nVidia will do precisely that. However, if AMD shows up with something that for whatever reason (ie., poor drivers, broken hardware, poor design, the moon is the wrong phase, whatever) competes only with their mid-range instead of their high end, they'll get by with yet another use of the mid-range product as the high end for a year and wait until they have so many chips lying around they'll know precisely how yields are going to look AND they'll have built up demand to be ready for a new $1k card to come: The Titan (2nd Gen) for $1199.
And of course, The Titan (2nd Gen) will be just a warm-up for the main event, the Geforce 990 that'll be a "cut-down version of the Titan (2nd Gen) with less memory and a few other options removed, but the performance will be mostly the same or better. And it'll be $850 instead.
And people will call it a deal because "it's got most of the performance of the Titan (2nd Gen), except 'only' at $850!"
This is the future if AMD continues to: 1) show up with a card with middling performance (and minimal gain over the last gen) due largely to poorly coded drivers that caused performance restrictions that afflicted them from launch until March of this year (ie., poor performance first half of last year, stutter until first part of this year, poorly designed memory manager by their own admission) as their high end at ridiculous prices higher than last gen for 10-15% performance gain over last gen; 2) abstain from releasing refreshes of current cards altogether.
If this is the future, then this sucks because it means nVidia and Intel get to do whatever they like. Look at Haswell and what it gives the desktop gamer. Look at the Geforce 7xx series and what it does for the gamer. This is what AMD not competing does for the gamer.
They aren't trying. They're focused on mobile and tablets and anything EXCEPT their core markets because they've written AMD off. And all AMD has to offer is, "Hey! GUYZ! Don't you still want more Bioshock Infinite, Tomb Raider, Crysis 3, and Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon? GUYZ!? You don't all have that from buying it off ebay, do you? DO YOU?"
Only crickets answer. Because AMD, Intel, and nVidia have managed to completely generate a hardware release cycle that everyone looks at from every angle and says, "You know... there's not even a 10% gain for anything below the $500 price point in either CPU's or GPU's. Haswell is going to overclock more poorly than IVB and IVB was whined about for ...untl Haswell. And the 7xx series is either too expensive (ie., 780) or not an upgrade for 6xx series users."
It looks like that problem of their users not upgrading because they don't see a need for it is now creeping into the enthusiast segment because Intel and Haswell are going to offer their most hardcore and traditional customers from the last two generations... absolutely nothing to pine for.