It sounds like the supply issues are more popularity than lack of volume. Which means it could get better quite quickly when early demand drops (and the RX 480, at least in CrossFire, should provide people going AMD with a viable alternative - where I am the AMD prices are a joke for stuff like the Fury cards, totally divorced from the performance/price curve of the 10 series cards so currently everyone buying a fast GPU will be looking for 1080/1070 stock). Hopefully we'll start seeing some competition for good quiet cooling, guaranteed overclocks, and long warranties around the starting prices for AIBs (rather than everyone trying to get away with Founder Edition prices for their AIBs).

@machofantastico: If you've been away from Team Green for a while, the GeForce Experience software (while some hate to have anything installed beyond just the drivers) is pretty essential to making the most of the new cards.

The auto-config for games is take-it-or-leave-it (I'll sometime use it as a guide or starting point to tweak from as it gives you a decent 50-60fps average setting to tune from) but stuff like ShadowPlay is really well done and now pretty stable. Nothing like having a 20 minute rolling buffer you can dump as an mp4 file to HDD at any moment (really makes the limited buffers on consoles seem short, especially as they're not even aiming for a decent 1080p capture). You might want to use OBS etc to stream to Twitch but that's also something you can do from ShadowPlay if you want a more console-like experience of just typing in your login and starting without configuration work. If you've got an Android tablet and feel like streaming in bed or something then Moonlight (free app) allows you to do that without needing an nVidia Shield Android device (just plug in or bluetooth a controller for input).

You also only get quarterly drivers from the nVidia website so to get every update you now have to use ShadowPlay to do driver updates (you don't have to have it constantly running but you do need to start it up to get to the game-ready driver updates).

@shivoa: I already see the headlines for Nvidia's next generation release: 'Nvidia's new $1000 True Founders Edition (TM) card without a cooler a huge succes'. A quote from Nvidia: 'People buy it anyway, so fuck it.'

Hopefully the RX 480 and the Vega release later will have a HD4870 impact.

Founders Editions and other over priced models have been available at least a few times a day, but i just havn't been confident enough to pull the trigger. For one i want a 1080 at least since it's closer to 4k BUT i'm not convinced the gap between the 1070 and 1080 is worth the extra 300-400. Seems to mirror last gen where the 970 and 980ti were the models to get where the 980 was probably over priced for the performance gain. (Which i ended up buying a 980 and don't totally regret it but i should have got a TI and i wouldn't even need to worry much about upgrading yet).

I wish AMD would attempt to compete at the high tier level to maybe keep these prices more honest at least.

@oursin_360: I guess that's Christmas and the Vega 10. Which is also when we all have to hope that the Zen CPUs push Intel to actually bother competing for the desktop CPU market again (and maybe start selling CPUs that aren't mainly transistors for a GPU gamers don't need - baring their rebadged server "enthusiast" parts which come at quite a price premium outside of the 4-core baseline).

By which point nVidia will be answering with the GP102 either as the GTX1080 Ti or TITAN [10? running out of "cool" letters] that pushes the 1080 down significantly and establishes a new super-premium tier $1000 above it (unless they're going to put a GP100 into the new Titan and sell it as "for scientists" as a development GPU for working on Pascal CUDA code - limit the throttled FP64 performance of the consumer cards and sell the chip already in the P100 for less - I suspect they'll not be doing this if the GP102 rumours are true as that'll be something they can sell for ~$1000 for the fully unlocked core and ~$600-700 for the one that failed to pass tests and had to be partially disabled during production).

Which does rather mean you either jump on a $600 GTX1080 now, or wait out the AMD response and nVidia's new top-end cards whenever they refresh/finish their Series 10 line-up at some point around the end of the year.

Newegg had the standard 1080 MSI non founders model listed on back order last saturday. So you could actually place an order for it vs plain out of stock. I just bought a 28in 4k monitor so said fuck it, and put the order in. Amazingly it came in on Monday! Sadly wasnt any cheaper then a founders edition, but supposed to be here Saturday! Found a site called now in stock which will email you when a product comes in. Seems like it could be really handy for trying to snag one.

It's funny reading this now because I totally fucking caved and picked up the EVGA FE of the 1080 on Newegg. I know it's overpriced but honestly I don't care that much about their overclocked lineup of 1080 reference cards and the complaints about the coil whine on the FE are super hyperbolic. As someone who doesn't care about overclocking I'm ok with not wanting to wait and just getting the FE.

With that said, don't be like me. Wait for other reference cards to get back in stock, just watch...as soon as my card arrives tomorrow the reference cards will all be back in stock.

Ordered a wind force gigabyte 1070. 399 off newegg, figured that's pretty low hope it's everything I want.

@gundogan: I know, right? Nvidia can do whatever the hell they want for the forseeable future until (hopefully) AMD can compete and smack them down a bit. No competition is bad for the industry. As much as I dislike AMD we still need them around!

bargh im going to be $400 to $600 poorer hopefully sooner rather than later. though im still not convinced a 1070 will be that big a leap over an r9 290, and my fx8350 will probably hold it back anyway so no point.

time for an i5 or i7.