Tempted to wait for the 390/390x myself, would be nice if they came before xmas but it's looking like it maybe just after now.. Maybe same with 980 Ti?

To be fair, the 290x prices were inflated far beyond nvidia because of the coin mining craze. Maybe more expensive but honestly, with the ability to capture gameplay, to be able to stream with the card, lower temps, and awesome driver support, it's worth the price tag. AMD can't match Nvidia as it stands.

ONLY 15% faster than last year's flagship? kinda disappointing isn't it? especially for the price they are gonna ask for it.

Ill buy PS4 and bunch of games...and HD7950 INSTEAD.

Pretty much this, while the competition's cards continue to be power hungry. That's just another reason to choose these cards.

Maxwell cores vs Kepler cores (Nvidia claims a 128 CUDA core SMM has 90% of the performance of a 192 CUDA core SMX), larger L2 cache reduces the need for a bigger bandwidth, higher clocks helps giving a boost to the texture fill rate so the 128 TMUs are not an issue, I guess the increase in Raster Units is there to help with bigger resolutions and last but no least the lower TDP which means less heat, so there is a lot of room for "OC", even on air! XD

the micro-architecture is different
It depends on how they organized the components inside the GPU

you have more than one micro-architecture
each one do the work using its own way
and you have hundreds programs
each program needs to do its own work
with different architecture you can't tell which one is better unless you test all of them on multiple programs and take the average

Apparently the "/s" wasn't a strong enough indicator.