I'm a pretty casual player, so as far as I'm concerned, I bought it with the expectation that it'll hold tight for a good five years, and I think it'll be true. Advancements are slowing down, optmizations will make things work. Hopefully.
Also, things look pretty good now. COmpanies just need to work on frame rates on consoles and pc. They'll optimize. I believe.
Driver optimisations will stop once Pascal is released. Just look at how Kepler performance has dropped below par now Maxwell is out.
If I had purchased the card to keep for 2-3 years I would be very unhappy because one of things I would have looked at is the memory configuration and 4GB on a 256 bit bus seems pretty standard for the performance level of the card. The thing it is is not quite 4GB on a 256 bit bus, it is 3.5GB on a 224 bit bus + 0.5GB on a 32 bit bus which is not quite the same.
I still think it is a good card, still worth peoples money and it would not have been praised any less if NV had just stated this information when the card launched. That is what boggles my mind and makes me think it was a genuine error on NVs part. There is no sensible reason to hide this information because it would not change the benchmarks and at worse it may have made people question its longevity. Some of those people would have gone for the 980 instead and others would have held off but I doubt it would have been a large impact because it truly is a great card for the money.
If you cared at all about memory bandwidth you'd probably buy an AMD r9 290(x) right? 512bit bus vs 256bit bus.
Was a big selling point for me running three screens and soon to be 4K. Gotta throw those textures around FAST.
Having said that, I can understand why you'd be pissed off if you found out that only 3.5GB of a card advertised as having 4GB of RAM was effectively useable in game.
Despite the smaller bus the colour compression tech in the Maxwell rage keeps effective memory bandwidth very high so it is not quite a like for like comparison. Just look at how well Tonga (285) performs in pixel fillrate tests, it is faster than the 290X despite having a smaller bus, slower memory and just 32 ROPs.