If the highest performing Big Navi SKU is thought by Nvidia to be greater performance than the 3080, by a significant margin, that's why they would want to leave not just room, but a huge price gap so they can land wherever they need to when they respond with the 3080Ti. Probably sooner than later. Below that there isn't as much wiggle room in terms of pricing.

Offer 3070Ti and 3080Ti performance for 3070 and 3080 pricing with Big Navi. That would certainly make things interesting. 3070 and 3080 like performance for $50-$100 cheaper would be the next best thing.

After multiple gens of overpricing, Nvidia didn't just all of the sudden decide to be generous for no reason this gen. These prices should scream worthy competition is coming. Below the 3090 anyway.

Let's talk about CUDA cores. So it looks like that seemingly massively increased number of shaders isn't the true story and neither are the TFLOPS. It has been noticed that performance of the new cards does not scale linearly with the core count as it usually does.

So the deal is that Nvidia basically invented hyperthreading for shaders and is selling it as double the shader count, which I find incredibly misleading. Two calculations per clock in the same shader just doesn't scale as well as 2 separate shaders. Yet they also use that "doubled" shader count for the calculation of TFLOPS. That means in real world performance Nvidia's shader count and TFLOPS are now worth less than they were with Turing and probably even below AMD.

But there is another theory I have I'd like some input on.

I believe that possibly applications are not yet able to fully utilize the massively increased logical shader count as you can parallelize only so much. Which is why I believe that performance on Ampere and any card that uses the new shaders will slowly increase to close the efficiency gap over the next 5-10 years.

It can aslo mean that the shaders aren't fully used. Some years ago, I don't remember if it was with Fury or the Vega cards, AMD had that problem. Those cards had something close to double the shaders of the regular, mainstream cards but didn't offer twice the performance because the chips wasn't well scaled and not all shaders could be used. Something akin could have happened this time to Nvidia, only to a less extend.

Another option would be that drivers still need to mature more and can't take full use of the new hardware.

There are advantages of having games @4k.
On console they Super-sample down to 1080P which provides a very clean and crisp image even at 1080P.

The console market is a bit different. SNY doesn't have the same general mind share that Nvidia does. If XBSX is the right price, along with Lockhart if it's coming, it will be more of a problem for SNY than if Radeon (6000?) can compete with GeForce 3000. Nvidia may lose some ground but it won't be that worrisome. That's at least partially why they went ahead. If AMD can beat them on performance and/or price, there isn't that much Nvidia can do about it, so getting out ahead and selling as many cards as possible before Big Navi get's announced wouldn't be the worst idea.

MS did the same thing with XBSX. Come at us bro. Well SNY did, and PS5 quickly became the heavy favorite, so. Consoles and PC's are different beasts though.

I wouldn't look at it as AMD as a whole here, because AMD tends to go more with the CPU's, and RTG with GPU's, though RTG isn't as commonly used.

AMD was super loud with Zen, but it's RTG that you should be focusing on. RTG has been marketing up a storm for years now, going back to Polaris, but unfortunately has been over hyping the products. Polaris wasn't quite up to par though fairly decent, but everything since has been a let down of sorts. RTG has been screaming from the rooftop about a storm coming, that never quite hits, or completely misses. Usually well in advance at that.

So why oh why have they been so silent all of the sudden? Everyone is seeing clouds forming and the skies darkening, so what gives? Is Big Navi even worse off than Vega, but they've learned by now and are trying to sweep it under the rug? Perhaps they're building a well armed horde, planning a 'surprise' attack on the king?

AMD knows Nvidia hasn't gotten sloppy like Intel. They may have gotten greedier, but they aren't lacking with their tech. AMD/RTG has to be much smarter about dealing with Nvidia than they were with Intel if they want to make up any ground in the GPU market.

I'd be surprised if AMD manages to not only beat, but even come on par with 3080. I'm not saying it can't happen, but I'd certainly be cautious about that, specially given the latest rumors about Big Navi (from AMD being surprised by the performance jump of Ampere, to Big Navi not being tapped out until recently, meaning that all previous rumors were fake or not true, to the latest kopite tweet comparing it to the GA104 of the 3070).

And when it comes to the price of the new cards, we also have to keep in mind that, because of COVID, the whole world is in the middle of an economic crisis and, as such, Nvidia can't charge as much as they want because they could risk to lose sales from people not being able to afford the new cards.

Also, looks like I could be wrong about the 3070Ti... (see below)

Where do you get that info about the "fake" shader count? Just curious, I'd want to read more about it because videocardz has an article about Lenovo spoiling the existence of a 3070Ti and says this:

NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 Ti spotted with 16GB GDDR6 memory https://videocardz.com/newz/nvidia-geforce-rtx-3070-ti-spotted-with-16gb-gddr6-memory

Interestingly, Lenovo also confirmed that their Legion T7 system will feature the GeForce RTX 3070 Ti model. This SKU has not been announced or even teased by NVIDIA in any form. Though, it aligns with the rumors that RTX 3070 series will be offered with both 8GB and 16GB memory. What remains unclear is whether the model is really called 3070 Ti or 3070 SUPER, we have heard both names in private conversations with AIBs.

(...)

There is, however, something to consider. NVIDIA clearly did not inform the partners with the full specifications until the very last moment. We have heard that the final BIOS for the Ampere series was provided only recently. The doubled FP32 SM (Cuda) count has also not been communicated clearly to partners until just a few days ago. Hence, some AIBs still list incorrect CUDA core counts (5248/4352/2944) on their websites. What this means is that Lenovo may still rely on old data, which could’ve changed over the past few days.

They seem to think that the shader core number is real.

From the performance figures they've given, Ampere has 98% more flops per watt than Turing but only 21% more performance, on average. That means one needs 1.61 Ampere flops to equal the peformance of 1 Turing flops, and 1.5 Ampere flops to equal 1 RDNA 1.0 flops.

It seems clear to me each shader was effectively cut in half before some architectural improvements, or perhaps it was the increased number of FP32 engines themselves that increased the performance relative to Turing.

With RDNA 2.0 apparently focusing on IPC, it would seem like Nvidia and AMD have more or less switched places concerning what their GPU design philosophy historically used to be. Ampere is very Terascale-like (lots of shaders, lower clocks and performance) while RDNA 2.0 is kind of Fermi-like (higher cloks and IPC but less shaders).

An Ampere CUDA core also has some similarities with Bulldozer modules, in that a second (integer in the case of Bulldozer, floats in the case of Ampere) unit was added to each processing core to increase performance and also make into those PR slides with twice the number of cores.

So, I don't think it's feasible to expect there's more performance left in future drivers (the same way that magical expectation wasn't feasible with Terascale or GCN).