I don’t see how he is salty.

Smug, arrogant, and showing his usual crap personality, yes.

Why would someone who's been winning for the past decade and is still handily beating the competition be salty? If it's true that the new flagship has no new features and is just barely reaching the 2080 then it's truly underwhelming. A card which does not have to spend massive real estate on AI and RT AND is on smaller node should be easily beating the 2080ti.

I would file this under smack talk and not being salty.

Dude, a 2080 Ti is like more than twice the die size of a Radeon VII and it has it's own useless crap too that doesn't help for gaming ... 

And you're telling me AMD isn't able to beat that on a smaller node without "useless" crap on the chip? The last time I checked the goal was to beat your competition and not to dally around in the lower high end.

Guys guys, why are you arguing? 95% of gamers are on low to mid range GPUs. It's like arguing what is better - Ferrari or Lamborghini. Who the f cares? Noone drives them anyway.

I love it when Nvidia pulls out the Raytracing argument; "but we have raytracing, take an unacceptable hit to fps to get better lighting!". Most people who are interested in effects and layers such as raytracing, or improved PP effects overall, are also of a mind to get high fps counts, and these wishes sometimes collide with one another. At present, Nvidia doesn't really have a GPU that allows full raytracing and other effects and any impressive resolutions and anywhere near impressive fps counts. This is like the first "4K-capable" GPU's, where the fps would hover around the 30 mark in most games, dip into slideshow territory for some and then spike into the 40's or 50's for others when a slew of PP effects and AA were more or less turned off.

This is why I generally don't like to buy hardware that are introduced along with new rendering effects or demanding visual coating; the intro chipsets are usually unable to implement the very technology they're selling in an acceptable manner. Better to wait one iteration, at least.

That said, I have a Nvidia card now and and I really love it, despite its cost at the time of purchase, and I'm not in a hurry to get back to AMD unless they give me a really good reason. Upping the memory and touting HBM2 as a (literal) game changer doesn't do all that much on their own, they're still lagging where it counts the most in the premium segment; sheer performance. I'm glad they've addressed overheating issues and that driver issues are more rare though, I find AMD cards overall to be a much more stable alternative today than they were a few years back.

A smaller node is useless if they don't decide to go the full way which is approaching towards the reticle limit. I would say your constraints are pretty similar in expecting a GTX 1060 to come out on top of a GTX 980 Ti ... 

I don't think you think you know what exactly AMD's goals are in mind. They only have political will to remain in the gaming market, not to dominate it like how Nvidia rolls out large specialized gaming GPUs. Technological superiority plays a role but at the end of the day what separates AMD and Nvidia is pure political will in which one will always use the bigger die. Just as gladiators live and die by their sword so too do the chips within their silicon but more specifically the size of it in many cases ... 

With Radeon VII, their main objective wasn't the gaming market but it was high end compute in deep learning. The Radeon VII is the exact same chip design found in their MI50/60 line of compute cards so AMD is obviously in it to make a quick buck for it in the gaming market despite a couple of flaws like half rate FP64 which only makes power consumption worse, disabled PCIE 4.0 which is still built into the chip, and then we have deep learning specific instructions which are somewhat similar to what Nvidia calls their "Tensor Cores" except baked into the instruction set as special instructions instead of a separate unit like Nvidia's implementation ... 

With AMD there are a several flaws with their approach when it comes to gaming like either not using a big die size or catering to the wrong market so without hitting these two notes properly they practically never are able to take the performance crown ... 

Looks like u have not read the Forbes leak about Navi GPU/Sony, there is stated that Vega development team was just decimated by Lisa Su for Navi, because she bets more on partners ( good idea!!! ) than their own products. And we have it offical, VII is Vega on lower die shrink, thats all. But it is only one battle, the war is already in AMD's pocket.

The fact that MS has just confirmed the next Xbox will use AMD, simply put, is that they ( MS ) prefer inferior AMD's solution than NV. This is ... a knock down, or something.

Only if u are good enough to see through things.

All the trails leads to Navi/Vega in next gens what is good enough. i dont believe it was just a coincidence that Phil announecs collab on next Xbox at the VII presentation. Basically, it is Vega on 7nm, what is what next gens will have to, and  Vega was never planned to hit 7nm, Navi was, so...

Navi, is rumored to be developed with close collab with Sony. AMD has rich story with semi-custom things.