Vega suffers from 3 short term failings that should be mostly resolved in 12 months.
-Drivers and/or game optimisations.
-Non suitable low power process. (14lpp)
-Low quality/high voltage/low clocked HBM2, which is also still likely expensive and difficult to produce in large quantities.
If AMD had use of tsmc 16nm FF+ and also mature and expected performance HBM2 I wonder what the effect would be on Rx Vega? 30℅ better perf/watt?
Add in mature driver fine wine magic and game optimisations which utilise Vega specific features (2 x FP16, dsbr, primitive shaders, asynchronous shaders,etc) then it could probably match or beat a gtx 1080ti.
As it happens not tsmc, but 7nm late next year on a proper HP process, hbm 2 should improve greatly in one year and software is likely to make large gains.
Vega uarch might actually be a smart long play by AMD, they are forced to swallow a tough early pill for hopefully a competitive uarch in the long run.