Soldato
Nope, the 7970 was a midrange part. It wasn't that much faster than the 6970 it replaced, it was only 15% faster than the GTX 580. That's why Nvidia were able to compete with it using their mid range card. Think how different it might have been if AMD had released the 7970 at $399 and the Ghz edition at $429
Nvidia must have been laughing when they saw the 7970's price. It meant they could launch their mid range part at high end prices.
We'll have to agree to disagree on this one. the 7970 was the high end in the metrics I said before. die size, memory bus, VRAM amount. Was there a higher card held back and released later? Nope and the dual gpu 7990 doesn't count.
They were too conservative with the clock speeds at launch and it cost them. The cards would do 1200 core routinely with good cooling and an overclock.