It's actually NOT a bad card.
It's just priced badly.

If it was priced at $150 for the 4Gb and $200 for the 8Gb rather than starting both at essentially $50 higher than that... Then this would be an entirely different discussion.
Can't forget the early adopter tax on new hardware either which is driving the price up higher.

For future titles the RX 480 will fare better, it's shown to excel in Direct X 12 whilst still providing adequate performance in Direct X 9/10/11.

I think people were thinking this was some kind of 1440P/1600P/4k gaming monster based on TFLOP's alone, which was never AMD's intention... And based on that, had unreal expectations for where the product was going to be situated in AMD's lineup.

If you wanted great performance, Vega was where it was always at. Polaris is mid-range. Navi should shake things up as well.

What's most strange is that it draws more power than a Geforce 970 despite being a 14nm card compared with 28nm and coming out almost two years later.

What happened to "2.5x perf per Watt"?

That was compared to their own cards which were notoriously bad in efficiency. The new architecture didn't do much in that regards and the efficiency gain is almost exclusively due to the shrink.

Yeah I know but it still isn't true.

A 290/390 draws 275W and a 480 draws 160W at top speed, and if the 480 is 10% faster, the perf per Watt becomes only x1.9. Although I should use the Fury cards in this comparison, correct? Then it becomes even worse for AMD.

Well okay, it's not that far from what was advertized. But like you say, they had so much catching up to do versus Nvidia.

Still almost a whole generation behind. It's painful to be an AMD fan.

The Vega must beat a 1080 at least, because by then there'll be a 1080 Ti and I want my next PC to be top class.

You might have to go with Big Pascal then. Rumors say that Vega 10 will be around 60% above the Fury X which will be above the 1080(40% above Fury X) but will be safely below Big Pascal. Though I fear Nvidia will adapt to that by not releasing the full Big Pascal and instead a smaller version that's only slightly above Vega10.

But either way the same rules as always apply. If you're on a budget, go with AMD. If not, go with the strongest card you can find.

Yeah I know but it still isn't true.

A 290/390 draws 275W and a 480 draws 160W at top speed, and if the 480 is 10% faster, the perf per Watt becomes only x1.9. Although I should use the Fury cards in this comparison, correct? Then it becomes even worse for AMD.

Well okay, it's not that far from what was advertized. But like you say, they had so much catching up to do versus Nvidia.

Still almost a whole generation behind. It's painful to be an AMD fan.

The Vega must beat a 1080 at least, because by then there'll be a 1080 Ti and I want my next PC to be top class.

Oh, there's Vega rumours already?!

If it's 60% above Fury X I would accept that, although before the 14nm tech launched I was dreaming of a new AMD GPU being 2.0x Fury X.

60% above the Fury X is exactly twice the performance of a RX 480. Do you really think they can do that in 2016, considering the RX 480 already draws a hefty 160W? That would need serious architectual improvements.

Well, we know Vega has 4096 stream processors, that's 77% more stream processors than RX 480. So assuming Vega has the same clock rate as RX 480, Vega would be 9.1 teraflops, a 77% improvement over RX 480, not a 2x improvement. However, a pure flops comparison doesn't tell you much, because AMD claims that Vega has further architectural improvements over Polaris. It's also possible that Vega will be clocked higher than Rx480, so it is possible for Vega to double RX 480 in flops. Power consumption could be a concern though, it's very unlikely at this point that Vega power consumption will be anywhere near GTX 1080 or even the eventual 1080ti and next Titan, we could be looking at near Fury X power consumption.

Oh yeah, not I recall I've seen Vega rumoured to have 4096 stream processors. But hasn't Fury X also got 4096 stream processors though and is clocked over 1Ghz? And yet Vega is supposed to be 60% faster than it? I don't follow. That would require architectural improvements out of this world.

Personally I don't mind Fury X power use, unless I buy two and do crossfire. Which I likely won't since one Vega GPU probably will cost $650 or something.