This makes me question manufacturers' choice of TDP. Does our new PC gaming world really revolve around that extra 1% so much?
Yeah It seems like a combination of things, going for those last few % to beat out a competitor or advertise larger gen-on-gen increases. Also, the frequency/voltage table would need to be suitable for 100% of cards that come off the production line, pushing them to use an even higher voltage per frequency in order to guarantee stability.
Overclocking used to be a lot of fun, getting 15..20...25%++ out of CPUs and GPU's in the past with little effort. Nowadays the vendor pushes them pretty much to the limit of their capability, where you're fairly lucky to get 10-12% extra under non-extreme conditions like LN2.
So I scratch my tweaking / overclocking / optimizing itch by undervolting, keeping the most performance I can (perhaps even a few % points more) while drastically reducing power draw and pumping up efficiency to fun heights.
I'd love to see a comparison of Pascal v Turing v Ampere, all stock vs all UV'd to get a glimpse of stock efficiency vs UV's efficiency gains gen-to-gen. Would be bloody hard to pull off though, silicone lottery and all.