Looks like Nvidia is going to have to shape up and steer their ship proper if they want to combat this because from AMD's side this is a really nice sort of comeback from them, especially when you take into account their offering being open source while Nvidia has theirs closed off. Nvidia's GW since the start has more or less hampered the games GW was a part of where the PC gamer would have to sacrifice a decent amount of frames in order to get that small visual gain and in some cases the gains where not all that great. Hopefully this along with AMD's version of GFE will make Nvidia think on how they next want to improve their own side, at least if they want to maintain their hold but in the end I see AMD's open approach winning in the end unless Nvidia adapt to being open than closed, time will tell.

Next year is definitely going to be an interesting one in terms of hardware/performance that's for sure.

Well, when you are making hardware, surely the ideal is to make your hardware as accessible as possible to the biggest possible number of users. You're selling bits of metal and plastic, not software. So why have closed software if you can sell more bits of metal and plastic by opening the software?

AMD is sorely disappointing me ...

AMD really doesn't understand what it means to "compete". They need to know that GameWorks isn't illegal and until they roll out something even heavier than that, AMD will still be seen as "subpar" ...

Integrity =/= Incentive ...

Performance is the only thing that matters even if it means undermining your competitors ...

Fans yelled at me once, because i am AMD/Nvidia(CPU/GPU). xD

It's funny you say that because when you get passed the smoke and mirrors Nvidia tends to perform the same or worse than AMD

I dunno why they would yell lol.

I'm an Nvidia user but I don't really root for them as much and more recently I find myself rooting for AMD because Nvidia are slacking and making bad decisions on their part. The more AMD improves their side the more it means for me to just buy an AMD card next time over an Nvidia one unless Nvidia really make things worthwhile for me in terms of perf/visual gains.

That's not what the benchmarks are saying ...

LOL which ones.  Yeah Nvidia usually wins when they launch a card, but give em a year and AMD starts crushing everything.

-7970 = Titan or 780

-290X > 780 Ti, 980

-soon Fury X beats Titan X

Most people keep their cards more than a year.

Especially when you see the benchmarks for games that sport GW and how much perf you lose when your actually make use of GW, Witcher 3 for example has users frames crippled with the GW/Hairworks turned on, I cranked on all the GW features on Dying Light and Nvidia's "enhanced" Depth of field ended up bluuring the surrounding visuals a lot more and in turn my frames were crippled to an unpleasing extent. I hate DoF in general so I turned it off and ended up gaining a lot more perf gains, the only GW option I used in DL was HBAO+ because without it the shadows to contact surfaces looked pretty bad. Also not a fan at all of their AA option in GTA V, that actually cost me more frames and didn't do an all around better job at killing jaggies, again it proves that we still have yet to see a middleground AA option that does a good job and doesn't end up crippling your frames.

AMD's features for Tomb Raider actually worked pretty well and if I rememebr correctly they were also open sourced as well, while with Watch Dogs Nvidia sought to cripple AMD on purpose which also crippled their own GPU users as well (especially when I wacthed Total Biscuit's review with both his SLI and non SLI setup). Nvidia as a whole has a lot more marketshare than AMD and I can see they don't want to lose it which has us watching them trying their hardest to personally cripple the competition on purpose than trying to work with it or around it, in the end they not only hurt progress but they hurt their own userbase in the process (forcing me to use GFE to gain driver updates is annoying as hell for example and doesn't give me any options).

980 still slightly beats the 290X in the majority of the latest AAA titles as far as I know and the Fury X hardly trades blows with the Titan X, much less the 980 Ti ...