Back then i'm pretty sure was the time ATi had shitty drivers, and temperatures, and for some reason i remember GTX2xx being a bit better, i also remember GTX4xx being the worst shit created by nvidia, also, introducing GDDR5 with not real benefits, sounds like a HBM part 1, i have to admit i don't remember about power efficiency.
Anyway nvidia has been doing the better overall product in the last ~10 years hands down, and it's not because people are stupid they're buying nvidia, or at least not all of them, as i said elsewhere, they both have the reputation they deserve more or less, it's not like ATi or AMD deserve more than what nvidia has now, they deserve less because they did worse, stop thinking that some kind of conspiracy or any sort of stuff, is the only reason AMD is in this position, it's actually hardly A reason to begin with.
The GTX 280 was a bit better than the 4870 in performance, but not $200 better, which is the point, nvidia still outsold, even with the GTX 400 series. All through the GTX 200-500 series AMD was more power effceint, which was a reflection of their small die strategy, yet still maintained performance very close to nvidia. Most temp problems are with reference coolers. As an owner of a 4870 I don't recall going much past 80C with 4870 even in crossfire during BFBC2. nvidia having the better product over the last 10 years, is just not true, as I have been trying to demonstrate. In 2007 with the 8800 series, yes hand down no denying, the 2900 series was not great. But from the GTX 200-500 series as I stated above, was just not so. Although the 6900 series was a bit sub-par in my oppinion, as it certainly lacked in AA performance compared to nvidia as well as tessalation. That all changed with GCN. The 7000 series was faster than anything at the time, until kepler came out (which was the begining of nvidia selling midrange GPU's as higher end GPU's). After some drivers updates the 7000 series was back on par with kepler. IMO The R9 290/290X was a big upset for nvidia, besting their $1000 card in several scenarios, unfortunately it was plagued by the bitcoin mining fad. A lot of Market share was already lost before this point, in AMD's case. They have had a bad stigma that they have not been able to overcome. Maxwell was a homerun for nvida, but was behind AMD in one aspect, asynchronus compute, which has really helped the AMD cards shine with DX12/Vulkan and has been in place since the first gen of GCN and still isnt in pascal, which is nothing more than die shrunk maxwell + more cude core and higher clocks. SO nvidia hands down for the past 10 years? No way. AMD has been very close and the technological superior comments made, are because they were doing very close to nvidia performance, with a small die, with lower power for most of those ten years while still being very close in performance. I am not making the case, that AMD has lost drastic market share because of some consumer conspiracy, I am simply pointing out that it is NOT because they were technologically inferrior. However, i believe at this point, Vega could be 15% faster than Titan Xp and AMD's market share would not grow drastically.
So please share, how did AMD do so bad? Where they failed was marketing and getting game devs on board. Which they are working on correcting now. nvidia won early on, IMO, because of their The Way Its Meant to be Played marketing strategy and later on GimpWorks. You could see this loading at the start of many games back in the day. I remember seeing this at the begining of UT2003/4 as the skar busted through it, there was a mod to change it to an ATi, logo.