I don't think that's really the issue. NVidia has had better drivers than AMD. It seems with DX12 the performance burden is on the app and not as much the drivers.
You can't be serious. 7950-7970-7970Ghz-280X demolish 670-680-770 in modern DX11 titles. R9 290 is now beating 780Ti and 290X/390X destroy it once they are fully utilized under DX12/Vulkan.
Sure, NV had better multi-threaded drivers but 1070 losing by 26-27% under Vulkan vs. Fury X is like 670 losing by 26% to the HD6970. It should never happen. 1070 is a Vega not a Fury X competitor.
Clearly GCN was underutilized under DX11/OpenGL but it's somewhat understandable how someone spending $600-700 isn't happy knowing Pascal 1.0 is yet another stop-gap NV architecture that will be outdated again in 2 years. It means there is a lot of risk involved that it could bomb in resale value by the time Vega launches and more DX12/Vulkan games are out. 1070 is a safer bet in this case.
It's highly unlikely that GP102 will add hardware Async Compute. First, NV finalized the Pascal architecture a long time ago and this hardware is simply missing. Second, NV likes that their GPUs aren't meant to last 3-5 years because it forces upgrades due to quick obsolescence. The majority of the market likes this too since NV is dominating in market share. Anyone else who doesn't upgrade GPUs every 2 years is certainly worried after seeing Pascal showing very poor DX12/Vulkan performance so far against Fury X. 1080 is also a mid-range Pascal priced as a flagship which makes the long-term investment in it even more questionable. NV will get away with it just like they got away with Kepler and Maxwell unless most games are DX12/Vulkan over the next 2 years -- but it doesn't appear to be the case. Hopefully Volta will finally create a true next gen architecture. Pascal is basically Maxwell+ with larger L2 cache and 16nm TSMC + more optimized to hit high clocks. It's looking more and more like Pascal is just a stop-gap DX11 architecture that will use raw GPU horsepower and incredible efficiency to make up for lack of next gen DX12 hardware.
You can argue that those who buy $450-700 GPUs shouldn't hold onto them beyond 2 years but according to NV's Investor Day slides, 70% of their install base was on pre-Maxwell GPUs. This means in reality, most gamers keep their GPUs for 3-5 years, not 1-2.