$850 CAD is $690 USD, so it's not exactly an insane price increase over MSRP.
If Canadians earned their income in terms of USD, you would be correct. Since most Canadian gamers' salaries didn't increase 23-25%, it's effectively a 1/4 jump in price compared to what they used to pay for flagship cards. Combine that with the fact that NV raised prices of flagship cards to start with, that means someone who bought a GTX680 or HD7970 only paid $499/$549 Canadian before tax but today that flagship card is $820 CDN. That's a massive increase in price because of the FX. If we are talking 2 cards in SLI, it means with 13% tax 980Ti SLI costs nearly $2000 CDN. That's crazy....considering these cards will probably lose 40-50% of their value in less than 24 months considering 14nm/16nm 8GB HBM2 GPUs are at most 18 months away.
If Canadians earned their income in terms of USD, you would be correct. Since most Canadian gamers' salaries didn't increase 23-25%, it's effectively a 1/4 jump in price compared to what they used to pay for flagship cards. Combine that with the fact that NV raised prices of flagship cards to start with, that means someone who bought a GTX680 or HD7970 only paid $499/$549 Canadian before tax but today that flagship card is $820 CDN. That's a massive increase in price because of the FX. If we are talking 2 cards in SLI, it means with 13% tax 980Ti SLI costs nearly $2000 CDN. That's crazy....considering these cards will probably lose 40-50% of their value in less than 24 months considering 14nm/16nm 8GB HBM2 GPUs are at most 18 months away.
Our dollar has been losing value because our current government is trash and the US dollar has been getting stronger at the same time. 1CAN=1US about two years ago, then we slipped to the high 9X cents over about a year and it's gone way down over the past year.
Now at this point everything is about 30% more here numerically vs US prices. Getting someone to buy for you in the US would save you the 13% sales tax, but there would still be the currency conversion from CAN to US.
DirectCanada has the PNY model instock for $813 with FS, so depending on where you are it might by CDN$850 for that model.
I'd definitely wait though, not only for Fury to drop but also for the aftermarket coolers to start hitting the market.
My summary from this discussion is, wait for a bit see how it goes. I think the only thing that might make me choose nvidia over AMD is the lack of 3440x1440 Freesync monitors.
Acer XR341CK Gaming Monitor Official Information
"Spec wise both versions offer a 34" ultra-wide screen size with 21:9 aspect ratio and a curved screen format. They are based on IPS panel technology and given we are only aware of LG.Display producing IPS-type panels in this sector, they are likely to be AH-IPS from LG.Display. The screens have a 3440 x 1440 resolution and support refresh rates up to 75Hz. Some people may be disappointed that there is not support for 120 - 144Hz but that is not possible at the moment from current IPS-type panels of this size and format. At least there is a bit of a boost beyond 60Hz potentially here which is something. The support for dynamic refresh rates via the G-sync or FreeSync technologies will help users cope with the demand of the high resolution as well here and are certainly welcome.
In other specs there is a 4ms G2G response time, 1000:1 contrast ratio (100 million:1 DCR), 300 cd/m2 brightness and 172/178 viewing angles (owing to the curved nature). They are listed as having an 8-bit+FRC panel which implies a 1.07b colour depth, although elsewhere in the spec it also lists 16.7m. A standard gamut W-LED backlight offers a 72% NTSC coverage / sRGB gamut.
The XR341CK (FreeSync version) will offer HDMI 2.0 (MHL), DisplayPort, Mini DP and DP out connections, along with a 4 port USB 3.0 hub. It will support daisy chaining via the DP out port and also PiP and PbP functions."
http://www.tftcentral.co.uk/news_archive/33.htm#acer_xr341ck
Both NV and AMD are taking forever it seems to roll-out new high quality FreeSync/GSync monitors.
slayernine, I've bent over backwards to be loyal to AMD starting years ago with upping my 386DX33 Intel chip to the AMD 386DX40 BUT after seeing the GTX980TI reviews and the FuryX reviews and since both are essentially the same price, the answer is easy. GTX980TI.