"Compared to what exactly? It is an improvement I will give you that, significant? Yeah NO."
and your previous comment
"It offers slightly more performance for a slightly better price while not improving power consumption and offering dismal overclocking performance"
Nice 180. So at first you state no improvement in power efficiency and now it does? The RX 480 is around 22% more power efficient than the 380 all the while providing over 50% more frames on average. Massive increase in FPS and they managed to decrease the power usage.
http://www.anandtech.com/show/10446/the-amd-radeon-rx-480-preview/4
Overclocking gains don't mean anything if the card is already throttling at stock, like the 1080. "signs of hope" is in your completely subjective opinion and could mean anything.
"No that is a problem for AMD. The R8 380 and GTX 960 were already out the door at the $200 price point. Hell at the time of release the GTX 960 was selling for as low as $160, over 30% less than the RX 480 8GB price. The RX 480 is coming in against the R9 390 and GTX 970 at $240, please come to terms with that basic fact."
Because if Steve says so it magically makes the card a RX 490? FYI, and I stated this before and you ignored it, the only reason the 970 and 390 are at their current price points is because of the RX 480. Also your pricing on the GTX 970 is off.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814133620&buyingoptions=New
You can get the GTX 970 above $260 in limited quantities only. Notice how newegg only has one model at that price. Most other models start at $280+. If you aren't going to compare model to model you should at least compare price to price. Even the GTX 960 is often costs more than the RX 480 and it is a far slower card. You are trying to argue that either AMD / Nvidia's out of production, limited stock cards are right to compare to a in production card. That's great if the intention of your review was to mislead. In reality there aren't many of these cards left and they are last gen. If you take the higher price and the value of next gen tech into consideration it's easy to see why the RX 480 is the far better value.
Also, another point you dodged, the lack of any benchmark criteria or what system was used is pretty stark compared to other review sites.
I really don’t have time for this pointless fanboy nonsense so don’t expect a follow up to this post, I will just clarify a few things for you.
The first comment regarding power consumption not being improved was in relation to the GTX 1070. Context is important I guess. The GTX 1070 and RX 480 consume the same amount of power, yet one is considerably faster. To me this is not an improvement, or at least not a good enough improvement I should have said.
The second power comment was comparing the RX 480 to the R9 390 which in my own review showed an improvement of 50 watts for the entire system.
The GTX 1080 doesn’t suffer the throttling issues you would like to believe it does, my benchmark results confirm this and so do those carried out by others.
Also, another point you dodged, the lack of any benchmark criteria or what system was used is pretty stark compared to other review sites.
What? I used the same test rig I always use for GPU testing, it’s on page 2.
So AMD discounted the R9 390 at the time of the RX 480 release to what … make the RX 480 look better? :S
Anyway I am out so take that as a win, you deserve it