Cards like the GTX 480, GTX 580 are huge monolithic chips with a high cost of production. They need to be expensive to justify there existent because they need a higher cost to justify their efforts to create and manufacture. Due to how yields work with larger chips, the cost of production for larger chips is not linear with a cost of production of smaller chips. It is improportionally more expensive. The engineering in terms of R and D is also much more difficult. It is why Nvidia has since abandoned until recently again(done when the nod is mature) launching flagship first and selling at volume. The GTX 480 was an example of this and vega to an extent as well.
The 7970 has more in common with the 5870 than a monolithic chip like Vega, GTX 480 or RTX 2080 TI or RTX 2080 even.
What was typical of the past prior to finfet is the die shrinkage from a newer nod reduced cost per mm by decreasing the cost per transistor. This was true until 14nm finfet. 28nm still brought significant saving
What AMD did was screw that. Our performance is the best now so lets keep all the profit for ourselves and pass on none of the savings onto the customer.
What this lead to is price to performance moving laterally rather than improving.
The same thing happened to the RTX in terms of price to improvement.
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The reasons for the RTX for costing so much are less greedy than AMD's though. The RTX 2080 cost more to produce than a gtx 1080 ti. Not only was it a larger die on a newer process, the expense of GDDr6 more than offset the savings of 3gb less memory as GDDR6 cost 70% more than Gddr5. In addition Nvidia had more than800 million dollars in inventory of pascal.
The 7970 was midsized and priced like a flagship at the time and even the 7870 which was mainstream sized and should have come out at 200 or less was priced at 350. I argue this was even worse offender considering cheap 28nm was being used to manufacture the chips and is priced the same as 7nm finfet chips when we account for inflation.
Forum goers did not react that negatively because of a strong bias for AMD to succeed and happiness for them coming out on top vs the GTX 580. But the public was different, they were more used to AMD providing better value, so they waited.
The GTX 680 came out with slightly better performance at a lower price which resulted in significantly better performance per dollar. And because of their brand strength and they were offering better price to performance than AMD, they were welcomed as the hero.
AMD was struck down by the sword of Damocles because it was playing a stupid and arrogant game of trying to leadership branding from Nvidia when they were not prepared and they thought they could take a victory lap when it was obvious the risk of their move. The competition was literally a few months from releasing and they only held a 10-20 percent lead over the GTX 580. The 7970 was no GTX 8800 and kepler was not going to show up a year later. After kepler launched the result was the 7xxx series stopped selling, the 7970 had fallen 200 dollars by the end of the year and AMD had to pack 3 AAA titles for the cards to sell well. AMD also lost a tonne of goodwill and marketshare as 7970 series card collected dust on store shelves after kepler launched. AMD was forced to sell the cards lower than a 5870 because AMD made it so easy for reviewers to write good reviews for the GTX 680 and 670. Performance, price and efficiency on top of the Nvidia brand, AMD handed Nvidia the keys to the market because they allowed Nvidia to become the good guys for correct AMD's greed while in actuality, nvidia was being greedy and taking advantage of AMD's ultra greed.
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