ThoseDeafMutes
Member
980/970 are really mid-range cards, sold as mid-range cards in the old days.
These days $329/549 is made such a big deal given GPU process manufacturing is getting difficult.
I'm aware that they are not the full potential of Maxwell and Nvidia "could" have brought out a beastly high end card if it had wanted to. More I would be surprised if AMD went balls to the walls by delivering a card 6 months later that is 40% more powerful; it seems at odds with recent trends where card makers would rather provide somewhat more incremental upgrades in terms of raw performance. I guess if AMD was feeling extremely threatened in the GPU space it might make sense, but the GPU side of their business was quite healthy compared to the CPU side - I would have suspected they would be seeking very high margins rather than trying to go for the throat.