That's one way to look at it but I disagree. 980Ti was a great videocard but with the new bifuracting a generation, you don't lose much if you just upgrade the following year to the next architecture - aka GTX1070 is a great price/performance stop-gap between now and Volta. 980Ti and Fury X launched in no-man's land time, exactly the fate the OG Titan suffered and which I warned about.
I am starting to see a trend that for 1080p/1440p gaming it takes about 1-1.5 years before the flagship GPU's power is really utilized and worthwhile. In practice it means by the time 980Ti's GPU power is actually needed, we have a GTX1070 that is better (lower power usage, Async, more VRAM) and costs a fraction of the price. I could have picked up a $650 Fury X or 980Ti but instead by the time AAA games demanded that level of power, I was able to pick up a couple Asus Strix 1070s for the price of a single 980Ti. That's a win-win for the consumer. Ever since the bifuracting a generation strategy kicked in, this has repeated
twice now. First, with $700 Kepler 780Ti -> $330 970 and now with $650 980Ti -> $380 1070. Knowing that Volta is scheduled for 2018 and it should be a new architecture compared to Maxwell and Pascal, it stands to reason Volta x70 GV104 card priced at $400 should be better than GP102 1080Ti.
I think these $800-1200 flagships are worth buying for someone gaming at 1440p 100-165Hz or 4K gamer. Otherwise, they are almost always a waste of $. You regret not purchasing 980Ti during the summer of 2015 but what's wrong with just buying a GTX1070 now for $370, selling it for $200 in 1.5-2 years from now and getting a $400 Volta x70 card/AMD equivalent?
You know how $550 980 wasn't worth its price as 2 years from its launch we can readily purchase $180-200 RX 480 4GB/GTX1060 3GB, $225-240 RX 480 8GB/GTX1060 6GB. To this day I believe it's better to buy GPUs more often. It's not financially advantageous to purchase a $700-800 flagship and keep it for 2, especially not 3-5 years.
Once next gen consoles release in 2019-2020, everything released in 2017 will be completely outdated for that console generation. That means there is even less logical explanation to "future-proof" with 2017 $800 flagship. Now that we've seen how X1950XTX and 7900GTX failed during Xbox 360/PS3 generation and how GTX680/HD7970Ghz already require major compromise in gaming at 1080p just 3 years into this console generation, you can be assured that ANY GPU released in 2017 will be completely outdated for the duration PS5/XB2 console generation.
Think about it,
November 2013 is when NV launched $700 780Ti 3GB. Today, GTX1060 3GB (or RX 470 4GB) is better in every way and can be readily found for
$160 -
$185.
The more expensive next generation GPUs get, the more they will depreciate in value (or look terrible in price/performance) when the next generation arrives. The best way to buy flagship cards now is to resell them ASAP before a next series is coming, which means dumping GTX1080 right before 1080Ti is released, or risk losing a large loss in resale value. I suppose it was always like this but we got spoiled temporarily by HD4870, HD5850/5870, HD4890/GTX275, GTX470/570 era where literally flagship die GPUs cost $250-350 max. Even R9 290 was a gift at $399. That's akin to selling Titan XP level chip for $399 today since we are talking about a cut-down flagship die of that generation.
GTX1080 is already
$580, and comes with GoW4 that can be resold for at least $20. Finally we are getting closer to GTX980's MSRP, and a far cry from the FE $700 pricing that made no sense.
I think it'd be more effective from a business point of view if NV released 10-15% faster refresh GTX2070/2080/2080Ti series since that would allow them to keep prices at similar levels and introduce 2080Ti GP102 at $899 or even $999. Then if AMD brings competition with Vega, NV can always drop prices. Since consumers have shown a willingness to pay $600-700 for mid-range die GTX1080, a 10-15% faster GTX2080 can easily exist at $699 FE pricing. If NV launches 2070/2080/2080Ti in 1Q 2017, it may still beat AMD to market and get a lot of additional momentum from the already wildly popular GTX1060/1070/1080 cards.
That's only a partial explanation. There has been FAR less competition in the CPU space than there is in the GPU space in the last 5 years. MicroCenter has i7-6700K for $259.99 and i7-6800K for $329.99,
both prices which is lower after adjusted for inflation than the MSRP of
January 2011 i7-2600K. If Intel priced i7-6700K at $634 (double the price of i7-2600K), I would simply refuse to buy it. Lack of competition alone doesn't explain the willingness of so many consumers to pay double for the same historical tiers. There is a lot more to it like prices of high-end audiophile headphones have increased 2-3X in the last 5 years despite the
most fierce competition.
When HiFiMan sold HE-300 for
$249, we now know they still make a profit at
$99. We also know that Sennheiser's HD650s which debuted at
$550 are profitable even at
$199.
With NV, what they are doing is following the foot-path of the overpriced audiophile industry, and sprinkling it with Apple marketing, creating an emotional attachment and desirability of the product.
Had Titan XP sold for only $499 like the GTX580, it would have never been as desirable to PC gamers and as a result the $379-449 GTX1070 and $699 GTX1080 wouldn't have looked like such an amazing value relative to the Titan XP. NV still hasn't matched Apple though as Apple charges $200 for an upgrade form an i5 to an outdated architecture generation i7 in the iMac when the entire i7-6700K costs $260 at MC. Oh, let's not forget $200 for 8GB of DDR4 memory upgrade. NV still has room to raise prices even more during Volta as Pascal is wildly successful despite
record GPU prices per each GPU tier. Just goes to show that PC gamers are willing to pay even more. If mid-range die 1080 FE sold like hot cakes for $700, a $900 1080Ti will be instantly sold out by
the same people who are about to dump GTX1080s on the used market. That's the missing link in NV's strategy -- since next series makes the old series obsolete and thus lose a huge amount of resale value, it will make it too costly to buy $700 cards and NOT upgrade to the next series. This gives NV leverage to price 1080Ti/2080Ti above GTX1080.