The 980 Ti was the last market altering card.
Your definition of market altering is something you clearly made up. There is absolutely nothing special about 980Ti in historical terms of ATI/AMD/No next gen flagships.
Reference 980Ti and Fury X are virtually tied at key resolutions of 1440p/4K people bought those cards for. The people who expected 980Ti to cost $750-800 were likely those who expected a fully unlocked die. Also, a lot of us realize NV can keep raising prices since its customer base is willing to throw more $ at quickly depreciating tech. So why not keep raising prices?
Your defense of 980Ti's "value" against Fury X or Titan X is a weak argument for those of us who followed this industry for decades since 980Ti is a successor of the $350 GTX570. Therefore, even at $650, since it was not a full die, the 980Ti was overpriced by a country mile.
Moreso, in just 15 months post 980Ti/Fury X release, those cards could be purchased for cor $325-350, or half price. 980Ti is nothing special compared to the lead NV had with GeForce 4 over 8500 for months, or GeForce 8 had over 2900/3800, or GTX285 had over 4890.
Once again, you dodged my question on listing every specific AMD videocard you bought from 2006. My guess is you never owned any or at most maybe one in the last 10 years. Guys like you only seem care for AMD to release something for 3 reasons: (1) it lowers the price of existing NV cards you planned to buy but waited until price drops due to AMD competitor pressures, (2) you are waiting for 1080Ti and hoping AMD will force NV to release it sooner, (3) you are hoping Vega is fast enough that NV doesn't price their GP102 cards in the $849-899 stratosphere (this is actually the reason you are making it seem as if 980Ti's price is $650 vs. your made up $750-850 range seems like a bargain deal). 780Ti was a full die and cost $699 and yet 980Ti was a cut-die and cost $650. Both the Fury and 980Ti a waste of $ for most of us even if we could easily have afforded them. It took at least 12 months for more demanding games to show up and when they did, you could pick up 2x 1070/980Ti/Fury Xs for the price of a single June 2015 980Ti/Fury X.
In any case, I've been on various forums long enough to know NV loyalists don't buy ATI/NV even when ATI/AMD are leading in nearly every metric. The same guys who claim they want the best IQ and performance and perf/watt would have purchased 9700/9800, X800/850, X1900/1950, and HD5870 series but instead they ALWAYS found magical reasons to still buy inferior NV flagships or wait (despite claiming they only want the best and will switch teams any time, but why did they use GTX275/280/285 for 6 (!) months when 5870 smoked those cards?) Same reason these customers waited 2.5 months to not buy 7970 that in overclocked form smashed 580 OC by 40-80% (!) on launch day! Same reason we had people bash Fury X's amazing AIO CLC only to later pay $80-100 premiums for EVGA AIO on 980Ti/1080 cards. Yawn.
I am glad AMD finally stopped caring about this group of customers and focused on themselves -- like the latest Crimson drivers. AMD knows that these customers are a waste of time and their opinions on AMD GPUs are frankly irrelevant. I would go even further. Anyone who owned all 4 these: GeForce 5+7+Fermi+Kepler should never pretend that his/her opinions will ever be taken seriously on objectively judging AMD's GPU products. Just owning GeForce 5+7 alone is enough to undermine the credibility of any GPU owner who claims to be objective as both of those series were complete garbage on the high-end.
An objective PC buyer who truly claims that they will spend any amount of money just to have the best performance would have at the very least owned 9700Pro/9800XT, X800XT PE/X850XT PE, X1900XT/X1950XTX, 7970Ghz since NV had nothing faster than those cards for many months. Prior to Fermi, NV's 2D and 3D IQ was so bad, they weren't even in the same ballpark as ATI/AMD.
You trying to make claims that AMD won't have a card faster than Titan XP is ironic when you dodged my point that AMD beat NV's flagship in the last 2 of 3 generations. You called me a one-trick pony instead of focusing on actual results AMD was able to achieve.
You keep making faulty assumptions that the type of users who bought GTX480/580, 980/1080, 980Ti and soon 1080Ti or w/e, at all care to dump their expensive GSync monitors and buy an AMD Vega. It's not happening except for a handful of people. How do I know? I remember the GPU buying history of these users going back to GeForce 4 days. You think it's hard to remember the same people who keep buying NV? It's very easy since they stood out like a sore thumb when ATI/AMD had superior products and they still bought NV. That's why the opinion of these same people on Vega or irrelevant. What matters is what the rest of PC gamers think about Vega.
The same reason opinions of people who owned Pentium 4/D and refused to buy Athlon XP+/A64 also don't matter. They are Intel customers for life and that's fine. Just let's not pretend they are objective when they voice their opinions.
The best part of all is there is only 1 company in the world which can compete with 17X larger market cap Intel in CPUs and with 5X larger NV in GPUs and yet people expect AMD to beat both of these firms or insert "AMD is ______." Some people on here are truly delusional and are completely clueless how business works in the real world. The fact that AMD is even close to NV and is about to u leash Zen that might trade blows with Broadwell-E is nothing short of remarkable.
NV can't make a powerful modern CPU and Intel can't make a powerful gaming GPU no matter how much $ they throw at the tasks. And yet here we have another thread when if Vega doesn't beat NV's best, they are ****, finished, worthless, etc.
So what AMD needs is a card that performs within about 5% of the 1080 Ti at an MSRP no more than $650, announced before the release of the 1080Ti and up for sale no more than a month after the 1080Ti. That I would consider a potentially market altering card for AMD.
5% faster than NV? Please, not a chance will NV loyalists switch for that.
I bet even if AMD had a card 10% faster but it uses 300W and 1080Ti uses 225W, many of them would cry about power usage too. Then they'll tell us how GSync is so superior to FreeSync that they would be willing to sacrifice more performance, plus you get TXAA, PhysX, ShadowPlay, and NV "superior drivers". Same story, different generation.
If you wanted the best of the best, you would have owned 9800XT, X850XT PE, X1950XTX, AIB 7970Ghz, and even possibly R9 295X2 since it was the fastest graphics card in the world for 6 months. I am guessing you owned none of these.
You cannot attack another member with this wall of text you have posted.
VC&G reports are again back up to the levels we saw months before. I am going to have to start issuing 30-60 day VC&G removals for the recidivist members, who keep derailing topics and attack other members.
esquared
Anandtech Forum Director