Come on link, that's not true at all. I've been going through quite a few benchmarks of late and the 390 beats the 970 in the majority of tests, yes it's noisier, yes it consumes more cycles, but it can also operate comfortably at higher temps than Nvidia. Now try overclocking a 970 to gain the extra 5-15 frames the 390 beats it by and it becomes very noisy and consumes just as much power.
TBH, I believe AMD has the hardware right now to gain marketshare from NVIDIA but some aspects of their gameplan are still behind team green. Take for e.g...cpu usage, pretty much every AMD GPU has a higher stake on your CPU during benches, lowering that could have them see some benefits in performance in (dx9,10 and 11 games). Perhaps that's what they did with the recent AMD drivers as we've witnessed some notable improvements in performance from their GPU's, meaning that the hardware has always been there......
The sad thing is, nobody wants to go against the popular team for fear of missing out on a feature or two, team green has all the popular extras right now, like the works stuff, which some will swear by that they need in their games and Nvidia will ensure that it maintains that hold on green fans, because they will ensure that hairworks don't work as well on competitive cards.
Look at benches of the 390 v the 970 in Withcer 3 and notice that the 390 is ahead at all times, turn on hairworks and see how much performance is lost by the better performer with the feature on. It's all a ploy to keep themselves planted in and they surely have the fanbase who would take lower frames in games, 3.5 GB of ram over 8GB because they swear by hairworks, it has become part of their gaming sub-consciousness.
It is what it is, people will look past the main thing, (performance) and applaud software like shadowplay, features like DSR and speak of CUDA cores and PHYSX as listed reasons why they will remain on team green.
The truth is, the monopoly is already established, so it will be very difficult for another manufacturer to break through. I think AMD is looking the best they have in recent years, but if they have to break through, they have to outdo NVIDIA in every category; power efficiency, performance, drivers, GPU features and software, form factor.......They do have performance covered on many sku's already, I'm seeing the strides they're making in their software and drivers, kudos for the form factor on their fury's and nano's, but they'll have to combine all of the above and come very good with Polaris to break through.
erformance and you're making excuses for AMD not even being able to compete with their second bests. At some point you just have to say ok, these guys just can't hack it and aren't really adding anything to the market. They probably have less than 10% dgpu market share at this point and are functionally nothing but a token monopoly shield like their CPU's are to Intel.
