The debut of the GP104 by NVIDIA so early maybe has caught AMD on the hop. We know that NVIDIA is the Master of Marketing in IT industry today (Superior even to Apple, in my opinion), and the recent show has proved this fact.
Until 3 days ago, almost all struck against NVIDIA: Polaris 10 seemed to have a better power consumption/performance ratio than GP104, Polaris 10 seemed to have better DX12 performances, Polaris 10 seemed to have a good overclock headroom, Polaris 10 seemed to have a good street price. Also, Polaris 10 is ready to hit the market in mass, GP104 not (In fact, it was a paper launch).
Thanks to this show, probably arranged in the last two months, NVIDIA has overturned the situation. NVIDIA has just shown some slides, some smoky numbers and features, and a reference – expensive! – edition, called Founder’s Edition, and from a defensive position is now the aggressor. Now, NVIDIA has an advantage over AMD.
Why a GTX1080 Founder's Edition? Full GP104 & GDDR5X are barely available -> so even reference boards are rare -> reference boards become special edition due to low availability -> now the name of reference boards is "Founder's Edition" to gain exclusivity status -> reference boards at high price.
Usually, when a company shows its own product as second can tweak the product in order to attack the rival’s product, but this time AMD can’t. NVIDIA has raised the hype about Polaris 10, even if AMD wanted to maintain the hype at acceptable levels. So, AMD in Macao has to show the real performances of Polaris 10!
NVIDIA, because of that, will be able to tweak its own cards in order to fight AMD Polaris 10 cards, waiting for GP106. A smart marketing strategy which – once more – show why NVIDIA gets 80% gaming GPU market share (Thanks to good products, naturally. Even a perfect marketing department is not enough when the products are bad).