People with 1080p or the lower res 1440p at 60Hz have little reason to buy 1070-1080 level performance.
-A 1070 is marginally faster than a 980Ti and Fury X. Those cards are still good for 1440p, but just barely for those allergic to reducing settings (which seems to be surprisingly many people). Anyone with one of those cards, a 1440p60 display, and looking for an upgrade to last another 2+ years would be looking at a 1080 or above.
Presumably most people buying $500+ video card are doing it for reasons other than "New! Shiny!", they want some benefit.
I wouldn't bet too hard on that. I've spent quite some time on these forums trying to convince people that replacing their 1080 with a 1080Ti while they're still on a 1080p60 panel is idiotic. Believe me, not everyone knows their own good.
The 4K, Eyefinity, lower 1440 res at high fps, and "maybe" the 3440 X 1440 at 60Hz (for sure at 100+Hz) folks are the only people that "need" more than 1070 level performance from what I've seen. (and maybe more than 1080)
That's arguable. See above. Also, you're mostly arguing against yourself at this point. I was the one pointing out that today's GPUs have sufficient performance for the vast majority of users, no?
You can say AMD doesn't need to compete with NV at the 1080Ti and up level, but I think that is a dangerous path for them to go down. When you become
known as the "middling performance, good price" vendor in the gaming world it's about time to look for other markets. Even to be the fastest at half the games for less money serves AMD best in my opinion.
Now you're just building a straw man to argue against. I never said AMD doesn't need to compete with Nvidia at the 1080Ti level or above. Don't be daft. Now please stop insulting me and the others reading this. What I said was that "competing" at the 1080Ti level or above with a dual GPU card in 2017 is suicide. AMD already has a reputation for being the hot-running, buggy, problematic, OC-less, in-need-of-an-AIO GPU brand. A dual GPU flagship card would just cement that reputation, and would hurt AMD far more than a high-end Vega chip that is "just" competitive with the 1080Ti. "Competing" with a dual GPU card is not competing at all, but rather a clear-cut admittance that they
can't compete at the high end. It would be the equivalent to Raja Koduri going on stage at the Volta consumer launch and telling Jensen Huang "you know what, you've beat us. Fair and square." Now, something tells me this wouldn't play out well for AMD.