People are idiots. Fanboys are morons. And the jack-holes on Reddit and OCForums are the kings of the shitpile. From the very first announcement of these cards, AMD told EVERYONE that these were a mid-range card with a bit of overclock-ability. One of the first non-PR flackey talking points was that the RX480 8GB card was more in the 980 performance range, but at 1/3 the price. The goal of the 480 series is to grab the 85% of the normal person market, and sometime later to put out a high-end card. EDIT: I'm one of the morons hyping the hype train. Looked at the OP and noticed I said that a single card was 1080 level, meant to say TWO cards are 1080 level performance, at less power and 2/3 the price. So I'm a part of the failure to manage expectations. I hang my head in shame. This article from the launch PR has a great pull quote on this: The whole point is to lower the cost of entry to VR and PC gaming. The announce press conference stressed "mid-range" graphics at the best price/performance (performance per watt in the announcement) on the market. The hype trains got wound up, way up, and I think that there were too many people expecting a $700 card's performance for $200. The benchmarks look about what I was expecting. Two cards together will push out about the performance of a GTX1080, but at 2/3 the price. One card is about twice the output of my SLI system that I have not upgraded in three years, and was looking to try out Crossfire versus SLI. As soon as the cards are in stock on Newegg, I am going to pull the trigger and get two of them.“The Radeon™ RX series efficiency is driven by major architectural improvements and the industry’s first 14nm FinFET process technology for discrete GPUs, and could mark an important inflection point in the growth of virtual reality,” said Patrick Moorhead, principal analyst, Moor Insights & Strategy. “By lowering the cost of ownership and increasing the VR TAM, Radeon RX Series has the potential to propel VR-ready systems into retail in higher volumes, drive new levels of VR content investment, and even drive down the cost of VR headsets.” via AMD