Yes, I know Titan came way before, maybe I didn't express myself clearly enough - two weeks later was refering to 780Ti only. But I wouldn't say AMD kept Nvidia on their toes by 2012 at all, since the lackluster performance of the 7970 (only 15% better than more than a year old gtx 580) enabled Nvidia to tackle it with 104 class silicon instead of the top of the line 110. Essentially they could have released what later came to be 780Ti in early 2012 as the 680, but they decided to withhold it and start working on Maxwell early while AMD was forced to keep releasing the best they could come up with right away. This way the green team started to always be one step in front, having an immediate answer to anything AMD launched right away and with years this one step became two and by now probably three. Without some major cataclysmic event on their end I don't expect AMD to ever properly catch up again even if it might temporarily seem that they are closing in.
Yes, the 680 upset the balance by being cheaper and faster than the 7970, and then the 290x upset the balance by being cheaper and faster than the Titan or 780, so Nvidia had to release the 780Ti and Titan Black cards.
And that's not even mentioning dual GPU monsters like the 7990 or the 295X, which remained as the fastest single cards throughout this whole period of time. (Please don't mention the Titan Z, I think we can all agree that abomination of a card should have never been released, especially at $3K}
Look, we can go back and forth grasping at straws about how things went back then, but that's entirely besides the point of my original post, the point being that at least AMD was gunning for the flagship cards back then, and in some cases beating Nvidia and forcing them to innovate and also lower prices.
Look at what we have now, the legacy of Raja, always releasing mid range cards and never really going for the top, and what has that brought us?
Nvidia sat at the top of the stack for almost two years with Pascal, and from the looks of it, history is about to repeat itself with Turing, and Ampere is set continue that dominance, but at what price?
Nothing AMD has done in the past few years has approached the level of competition they had at the top of their game, and so we have to deal with $1200 flagship cards that don't really need any updates in both performance or pricing cuz nothing compares to them. And yes, I know Titan broke the $1K limit years ago, but that's an entirely different market segment.
Can't you agree that a more agresive AMD, one that was actually fighting for the top performance spot, would be a good thing for all of us?
Let's not go in circular arguments about cards that actually competed against each other on equal footing, at least back then we had that, now we don't even have any competition at all at the top performance level...