Thanks once again @liberosist for your excellent writeup. I have found it to be one hell of a roller-coaster this past year, with myself batting for the orange team since 2011. I find it quite astounding that Intel didn't have insider knowledge or leaks from AMD when the architecture was being worked on, that they would have then been able to work on their competition.
I personally was going to buy into Vega or Polaris, but found that the performance gains were not worth the investment. Plus with the age of the GPU miner pushing up prices ridiculously, I still am chugging along with my R9 380 quite fine.
I think that AMD has a good wedge now, that it may be able to continue the fight against the empire.
I had a GTX 680 before (really regret that purchase, 7970 turned out a much better GPU). I bought an RX 480 as a stop-gap. I was tempted to get a GTX 1070, but couldn't get myself to buy Nvidia again. This year, bought a Vega 56. I must say, it's a huge jump from RX 480, let alone R9 380. ?That said, it's overkill for 1080p/60, so it depends on your gaming needs. Mine is 4K/~50fps with Freesync, so Vega 56 makes a huge difference.
My needs these days are spending my money elsewhere. I frankensteined my components together from my last build with the Ryzen 7. My 380 can actually still drive games quite well, even on a 2560x1440 screen.
The thing that stops me buying a new gpu is the huge jump that would incentivise me, as well as non-crap games, (non-EA) like a new Elder Scrolls game (I Wish). But at the moment, all I play is Factorio, which needs could more than GPU.
And yes, I do have a HTC Vive, but the games are gimmicky, overpriced and short to warrant me actually using it, and therefore needing the higher end GPU to drive the 90fps.
I feel that largely apart from AMD with Ryzen, games and innovation have largely been stagnating.
This is when also looking at the Mobile Phone market. The phone has 6gb ram (ok...), It's got a 30% faster CPU (like I notice these days), it had an 8k screen (exaggeration but still true, also it's not needed in my view, 1080p is just fine)
The huge leaps we used to see isn't really there anymore, it's more.... Incremental. I think we are ready for the next True era, the age of the implantable, wearable, contact lens type thing with full FOV, power, and AR supported, like if the hololens, magic leap, Vive, mobile phones all had a Frankenstein baby, which turns into something beautiful.
Sidenote.. my comment seriously diverged from the original purpose...
Lol