I dont know where you get this 50% from - perhaps its from this rambo world with "beaten" and "burried" - but certainly when you have less dev budget and cant operate with multiple dies you are bound to have a mm2 disadvantage at same perf and to a degree also a efficiency disadvantage. Those should be outweighted by reduced r&d cost and beeing able to sell products for less.
50% more ROPs? This is technical discussion, perf/$ is great for us all, but in performance pecking order AMD parts are behind for quite some time now.
But with an organization with 3000 people you have the manpower to develop and use eg tiled based rendering and a more programmable shader model. Its a matter of good technology top management and knowing how software and hardware interfere. Nv didnt arive where they are because of ressources but because of better management.
NV has been executing so well that it is understatement of the week to mention them in same sentence as "better management". Still AMD is spending way less on R&D and no management miracles can save them. They had full extra YEAR to come up with new chip and we got what?