somebodyspecial :
audiophillia :
now I have seen benchmarks before and I am not the type of person to spend that much on a gpu. However this card is be shown off as a Titan comparable card and if that is true. I don't think price really matters. People in the high end market are not looking for price to performance they are look for performance. So what the R9 290X need to do is beat the Titan or 780 and it will sell.
NV will sell well because they have drivers that work correctly. Why do you think AMD gives away all the games? It's not because they like you, they have to! Most would rather buy NV and forget the games knowing they are having less driver issues (currently?). NV owns 65% of the discrete market for a reason (and it certainly isn't their free games included with each card).
BAD drivers=BAD PR. It's not rocket science. Queue typical NV haters...LOL. It sucks AMD people, but these are the facts of life for AMD owners for 2yrs and still waiting for last gen to get ironed out even as they're about to release a new gen while claiming their cards are tops for multicard pc's etc. NV couldn't launch an "AMD DRIVER SUCKS" campaign if they were problem free already. You can call it dirty, underhanded etc, but if the shoe fits...
So what you mean to say here is that when it comes to multi-GPU setups, AMDs drivers are not that great. Because last time I checked, the HD7970 easily performs the same as or better in a few games as the GTX770. And for the multi-GPU its mostly frame pacing issues, which until recently was not something that was considered a major issue.
As a single GPU, the HD7970 is a great GPU. All of AMDs 7000 series are. It easily kept up with and then with newer drivers beat the newer GTX680.
As for the R9 series, since it is a new card not set to come out for a while we don't have any drivers or real reviews to tell us how these cards will perform. The current drivers have improved frame pacing for AMD a lot and I am willing to bet the next set of drivers, which will support the new GPUs, will also fix multi-GPU setups.
That said, I think the pricing is a bit high if true. It doesn't show any real competition as Titan was a one time thing. But since AMD is showing it is willing to go to that level I am sure the next top end GPU from them will be $1K when it beats the R9 series.
Honestly I am hating these price increases. CPUs get cheaper for more power but GPUs keep going up. I remember spending $300 on a 9700 Pro as well and also for my 9800 XT, which reminds me just because a GPU comes with free games it does not mean its a bad card. The 9800 XT came with a free copy of HL2 and was still the best card of its era. The HD7970 had the free games even when it was beating the GTX680.