JackNaylorPE :
Unfortunately, I haven't found an AMD card that is performance competitive (overclocked "bawlz to the wall") in any cost categories I'm interested in. Only category I'd look at AMD is as an alternative to the 960....
I'm a hardware whore ... no loyalties, no fan like adoration .... my money goes to whomever has the best numbers and features on non-reference cards overclocked as far as they will go. AMD hasn't been able to be competitive in generations in the upper price categories and has slipped a bit more with each one. There is a reason why their market share has dwindled to 20% and the 970 has outsold all of the R7 and R9 cards combined ... and by a significant margin. With Intel squeezing from the low end and nVidia at the high end, AMD is in a tough spot.
Technological innovations tend to stumble in the 1st iteration, I'm hoping they can recover and put some competition into the next one..
the reason is purely marketing.
nvidia has put drivers out that killed gpus on at least 2 occasions, something amd doesn't do.
to my understanding nvidia is willing to downgrade their old gpus to make new ones more attractive, see the 780 line where a driver upgrade made it perform worse in old benchmarks.
they are also willing to soft gimp their old cards through extreme tessellation that has no effect on visuals because its sub pixel, though this may be more an eff you to amd as amd performs tessellation worse than nvidia (or at least nvidias implementation of tessellation) but it has the added benefit of screwing over the older cards to make the newer ones look better even if the fact if they turned it to a reasonable level they would perform much better as a whole... something amd lets you do in drivers that nvidia does not.
than you have nvidia blatantly lying about 4gb cards... you know if i buy a car with 6 gears and it was sold to me as a 6 gear car, and the moment you shift into 6th gear the thing stalls out i would want a full refund if not sue while not getting another car from that manufacture, but somehow nvidia does this and people say screw the 970 ill just get a 980 instead.
hell, the worst thing that amd did in screwing over competition would be they made mantle that had an end goal of opening up to everyone so long as they used the standard... they did not actively remove parts of a game because you don't have their hardware.
see for me its not that im a fan of amd, i just hate nvidia with a fiery passion and anything shy of getting a 980ti for sub 200$ would ever make me use their stuff, intel isn't competitive in graphics, but amd is.
on the cpu side intel is arguably worse than nvidia in the shady crap they pull, but they have such a large lead that if i got a new cpu today, i would go intel... im holding out on the zen largely because of an immense disdain for intel and their current and prior business practices.