People seem to forget that everyone has different criteria on which they make their choices.
- Some people care only about raw performance. If one card is 3% faster than the other, they want that one. And they would call the other card "fail".
- Some people care about overclocking. They only compare performance of 2 cards when fully overclocked to the max. Others don't want the hassle, and will probably never overclock their videocards (like me).
- People play different games. Your favorite game might behave completely different from average performance. So while card X might be 5% slower on average, it might be 10% faster in your favorite game. Same thing with features, you might like high AA, and one card performs better than the other with high AA. Same with resolutions.
- Some people care about features. Multi-monitor, types of connectors, etc. Others have only a single 1920x1080 monitor, and don't care about all that.
- Some people care about software. Stability of the drivers, easy of configuration, timely optimization for new games, adding new features to old games, etc.
- Compute power. Not just in videogames, but GPGPU. OpenCL and Cuda. Most people don't care. But some do.
- And then there is power-consumption. Some people care about power because of the energy bill (e.g. if you want 24/7 computations). Others care about the heat.
- And I care about the noise. And thus the heat. And thus powerconsumption. But also fans. Are waterblocks available ?
It seems most AT readers find only the first criterium important. Raw performance. One card is 3% faster, so anyone who wants the other card is an idiot. A few more find overclocking important. But everybody seems to forget about the other criteria. They might not be important to you, but they might be important to others.
I bought a gtx680 at release. Would I pick the gtx680 again ? Maybe. From what I've read at benchmarks, it runs quieter than the 7970. And I imagine the GHz-edition runs even slightly hotter/noisier. When performance is so close, this factor might make the difference for me. Am I an idiot ?