Titan X competitor is coming out and it's not the R9 390X

AMD really doesn't seem to have any direction right now. In fact, if it weren't for gaming consoles and mobile chips, they may already have gone away.

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This is basically what nvidia has been doing prior releases. Release 2 top in cards and rebrand the rest

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Oh I know. I didn't necessarily expect any different from AMD, but I can't help but feel underwhelmed and concerned for AMD as a company. As stout said, AMD seems a little aimless right now and their attempts to claw at more of the market share have turned out to be feeble. NVIDIA is streamlining the PC gaming experience at every turn. They're doing it in some nasty ways that are overall harmful to the gaming community, but it doesn't stop consumers from herding around the shiniest, liveliest thing in the room. AMD's response to NVIDIA's proprietary tech has simply been to complain and debate about it.

They want open standards for gamers, but gamers just want the superior solution. AMD's TressFX, for example, is used in a total of 1 game and has equal performance impact on both NVIDIA and AMD GPUs. Then their late response to Shadowplay has been GVR, which can be used with NVIDIA cards as well, yet Shadowplay is still slightly more efficient because it uses NVIDIA's proprietary encoding. And there's AMD's Mantle, which brings the possibility for extraordinary leaps and bounds in the way games take advantage of hardware, but its initial benefits are being absorbed into DX12, leaving yet again no proprietary advantage to AMD other than promises of great things in the future. Then Freesync, the answer to gsync, is based on an open standard as well. Except that it means nothing since the competition has no incentive to implement the open standard into their own drivers. It was an opportunity to take advantage of vendor lock-in by flooding the market with affordable freesync panels, to overwhelm the smattering of expensive gsync monitors. Yet, with 3 new high-end NVIDIA cards on the market and a 4th looming on the heels of AMD's release of one or two new cards that may very well match the Titan X and beat its price, we have half a dozen Freesync monitors (none 4K, when a 4K-worthy card is releasing next month) with inconsistent dynamic refresh ranges and driver support delays (e.g., crossfire support for freesync has been delayed indefinitely).

It's typical that AMD releases a behemoth flagship that beats NVIDIA in raw hardware performance, uses more power, and is priced considerably lower. It seems like that's what's going to happen again, and nothing more. I read an article recently that AMD is going to move away from being the value solution/low-end dominator and start competing at the high end. At a minimum, there was an opportunity here to unveil top-performing cards with the first-ever HBM stacks, priced competitively, with a couple of Freesync 4K monitors already on the market, crossfire-ready freesync drivers, etc. But for whatever reasons (unavoidable QA issues I guess?), it's a huge missed opportunity.

It's not a matter of which company is doing right by the consumer or has the best value, but rather the consumer's perception and the massive hurdles AMD faces in staying relevant, and what it'll mean if AMD is no longer competitive with the likes of NVIDIA. It's becoming clear that being the cheapest solution, even at the top of the benchmark charts, is not going to cut it anymore.

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Green is definitely doing some shady shite that isn't good for the community as a whole BUT they're doing something. AMD just seems to be dropping a new gimmick every once in a while with no clear vision or direction.

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Exactly. Nvidia has taken an approach in creating a brand in gaming hardware, while AMD has remained best known as a hardware supplier. I don't see that changing much anytime soon, and it's frightening to imagine nvidia as a monopoly in GPUs. Nvidia was accused recently of crippling performance in non-Maxwell cards in its latest driver update. They're promising a fix for that in the next update and denying malicious intent. It's an absurd thought, and it's only based on the rest of the company's competitive tendencies that I suspect there's a little bit of planned obsolescence at play. There are at least some diligent users to keep them in check about this, but what happens if nvidia becomes the cable company of GPUs?

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had some issues with drivers about 9 years ago. AMD card was a nightmare. Don't even remember which one it was at this point but I haven't had that problem with Nvidia.

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See, this has never been my experience with AMD, other than hit and miss crossfire support. Granted, 9 years ago was a rare nvidia phase in my life, and I wasn't as knowledgeable about the market. Nowadays, for the average person who sticks with the WHQL drivers and a single card with a non-stock cooler, AMD is a best bang-for-buck solution that works perfectly well. The problem is that consumers continue to see the nvidia logo everywhere, with all of nvidia's gimmicks dangling over AMD users' heads, plus the actually non-gimmicky nvidia-exclusive things like the Shield tablet, Shadowplay, DSR, and Gsync. AMD's responses to some of these value-adds have been adequate, but being second to the market, AMD squandered--or perhaps lacked the resources for--an opportunity to take nvidia's ideas and make them better. And AMD basically has no answer to nvidia gameworks except to complain and make accusations. Nvidia is a slimy a-hole whore and has its mouth on lots of developer peen. Since over 75% of the market doesn't seem to mind, AMD should consider following suit.