I still think a lot of the issues with Polaris came down to problems with the process at GloFo than the design from AMD.
Hopefully they have it sorted for Vega or they're using Samsung because I don't think they'll be able to have a truly competitive product otherwise.
True to some degree but Polaris was NEVER meant to be high end only the mid range building block.
I have 2 reference Polaris Sapphire RX 480s in CF in my 6700k rig below.
AMD had the very early power problem which they quickly addressed through drivers prior to the aftermarket cards being released. This was a bad way to start but credit AMD for quickly addressing the issue.
The RX480 is not a great OCer in my book BUT a nice improvement from my previous R9 290s.
Less heat and much less power draw for the performance.
As drivers mature for Polaris RX480, it appears to have drawn even, if not slightly surpassed the GTX1060. Is it competitive with the GTX1070 and GTX 1080? - NO. Not unless you CF like I did and then you have the inherent problems with multi gpu setups. But at the price point it is in one should not expect it to take on the GTX10790/1080.
Nonetheless the RX 480 is a great 1080 gpu and provides decent performance at 1440p also.
I think Vega should be a big setup up and be competitive with the higher end Nvidia cards. It will likely be much more expensive than the RX480.
With this CES Radeon event in @ 3 days, hopefully we will come closer to finding out.