Yeah, STOP RIGHT NOW!
What I like about the AMD cards is that they give very good results at a reasonably low price. Maybe not as fast as the Nvidia cards that they try to compete against, but still very good performance for the money.
My view towards Nvidia is that if you can't afford the very best Nvidia, nor near the top of their line, then you might as well save yourself a lot of money with a top, or near top, of the line AMD card.
And as I've said over and over, the upper half of either card line is more than enough for FSX. BTW -although Prepar3d is still very similar to FSX, it now uses any extra memory & power of the video card to run P3d.
To Nvidia fans all that is, of course, heresy.
Now, things are about to REALLY change.
Nvidia’s GTX 1080 and GTX 1070 revealed: Faster than Titan X at half the price
"GTX 1080 will cost $599 and launch May 27, with GTX 1070 following June 10 for $379."
Of special import to me is this -
"Meanwhile, Simultaneous Multi-Projection is a new rendering pipeline for Pascal cards that allows them to render 16 independent "viewpoints" in a single rendering pass. In a regular graphics card, a single viewpoint—i.e. what a user sees on a monitor—is rendered in one pass. That's fine for most applications, but problems occur with multi-monitor setups and VR. In a triple monitor setup where a users curves the monitors, the graphics card can only render a single viewpoint, where it assumes all the monitors are arranged in a straight line, resulting in the images on the left and right monitors looking warped."
Traditionally, this problem is solved by using three separate graphics cards in supported games, but with Multi-Projection, the single GPU can render three different viewpoints, with two of them correcting the distortion.
"Simultaneous Multi-Projection" is also important for VR.
Read the article, there's a lot more interesting info.
In short, the GTX 1080, at $600, will probably be more than I'm willing to spend. But the GTX 1070, at $380, will be very tempting.
As far as AMD is concerned, they intend to produce VERY fast video cards at a MUCH lower price than the nearest Nvidia equivalent.
Why a reformed AMD is going all in on VR, rather than badmouthing Nvidia
Instead of running behind Nvidia, they seem to be tacking in a slightly different direction and betting heavily on the VR boom.
If Nvidia can live up to it's promises in the first article, AMD's offerings will have too little to offer for any heavy gamer.
However, AMD will still have a place for anyone who wants a very good card at a relatively low price.
If the toughest game that you play is FSX, you can safely buy any upper-end AMD card.
It you have three, or more, monitors, and use Prepar3d, wait for either the GTX 1080 or GTX 1070. No question about it.
A note on the DDR4 vs DDR5
The two Nvidia cards, GTX 1080 and GTX 1070, use DDR5 & DDR4 respectively.
In theory, and strictly by the numbers, DDR5 is faster than DDR4.
However, during my search for a new motherboard, I found out that DDR5 didn't live up to it's hype and extra cost.
But that was for motherboards with the newest Intel chips. It may be very different for either video card.
My advice would be to wait until both cards can be compared side by side when they're out in July.