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.
Let alone the costs, that's the only big issue with nvidia. Fermi refresh aka GTX5xx was better than its counter part, you yourself said even GTX4xx was faster, but with all those big issues, well 5xx was even faster and with none of those problems, actually i think that 5xx was one of the most successful recent "architectures". Again about power efficiency i don't remember back then but i pretty sure remember "faster" and "cooler". My old GTX580 reference pcb/cooler reaches 85C now, pretty sure it was under 80C back then even at full load. So let's recap, 8800 series was great, 9800 was just a rebrand, so, just faster, with all 8800 series pros, GTX2xx was a better product than its counterpart, despite maybe efficiency (?) GTX4xx was aids, GTX5xx was pretty good as it came with GTX4xx or better performance, but run cooler and less power hungry and everything else, after that GTX6xx 7xx 9xx, nvidia always had the upper hand, at least for the first years the product came out, after that, Rx 2xx/3xx "finewine" kicked in, and those cards managed to age better than nvidia counterpart, and eventually managed to reach or slightly top them, all this at least 1 year later in some case, 2 or more in some other case, not to mention the poor efficiency and temperature on those cards, that were pretty much always worse than nvidia counterpart. Also now that i remember my brother used to have a XFX 5850 in his pc i built back then, and i remember it being a pretty decent card, but it was very power hungry and temps were not that good, just ok.
ATi/AMD has been behind for the last 10 years, i agree that they always were pretty close, incredibly actually, having far far less funds than nvidia, that's admirable, they surely worked harder than nvidia, that's no doubt, but they were behind, except for GTX4xx, in the rest of scenarios, nvidia just managed to collect more points in terms of pro vs cons, so if certain ATi/AMD card was more power efficient than its nvidia counterpart, it was at the same time slower and had higher temps and not so good driver support, that's why i used the term "overall" because we cannot just use, 1 pro as an example, and make it matter more than the others, if a X card was faster than a Y card, but the Y card was more efficient, cheaper, lower temps, and better drivers, the Y card would be the better card overall, and this repeats with all the other pros, as long as one card as more pros than the other, that's the better product.
You wanna talk about dies? Ok let's do it, let's talk about Polaris vs Pascal GP106, let's see, 480 is slower, hotter, FAR less power efficient, maybe has better drivers, cheaper (maybe, because initially, here in europe i can assure you, was far easier to find 1060 at a decent prices, 480 had insane prices and far less availability), less availability at launch and for the 2/3 months upon launch, so which one is the better product? You can't only make price matter, if 1060 cost more, how much more it's to see but, still, let's say it cost more, because we're not only talking about europe here, what's the problem? It's the better product, in almost everything, OH i forgot to mention that Polaris has a slightly better performance on DX12 and Vulkan (maybe, because DOOM's shift of framerates isn't only related to Vulkan), GTX 1060 is still a winner overall (i ordered an XFX rx 480 gtr black edition a week ago, should be shipped either today or tomorrow, so no, i'm not the fanboy you think i am).
Ok so i shared how AMD did worse in the last 10 years (no blame, seen the funds) they also failed miserably in marketing yeah, which they are correcting now? Really? "Poor Volta-ge" anyone? "It has a brain" "it has a soul"? Really, correcting? No. Gimping cards is still another one of those legends i really wanted to see with my eyes, because sounds so much like a BS, but no, hey, BS only come out of nvidia's mouth.
"
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"
Basically ATi/AMD in a nutshell.
