People are forgetting that this is a THIRD generation 20NM process with Finfets. Many of the yield issues would have been solved by now as both TSMC and Samsung have had a long time to muck around with them.
Remember its been nearly 4.5 years since 28NM debuted with GPUs too. It just shows you how much Nvidia PR has managed people's expectations and has done a very good job. They would not be making nearly 60% margins up from the early 30s 4 to 5 years ago,or having record profits,which they used to spend billions on Tegra and other areas.
People need to look at them as a whole company and realise they are making far more money per card than they have ever had - even Rollo was making the same analogies years ago about luxury and entitlements,so be wary of being sucked into such arguments.
The same arguments were made,that 28NM was very expensive,etc. Yet the GTX670 at the same dollar price was 20% faster than the GTX580.
The GTX680 was only 10% faster than the GTX670.
If you even look at the JPR figures you will realise that the vast majority of card sales are under $300. IIRC,I read somewhere that of the 15% sales above $300,only 3% are above $450,ie,£310.
Hence,the GTX1080 is not going to really sell in volume - it will be the GTX1070 which is the bigger selling SKU. There is no excuse for the GTX1080 to be like 25% to 30% quicker - it is badge engineered on purpose to that level.
Nvidia made decent money selling a GTX670 which was close to a GTX680,let alone a GTX970 which was not far off a GTX980,or the 8800GT which was not far off the 8800GTX,etc. ATI only had the HD3870 in the latter case.
The GTX1070 is only a 150W TDP card FFS - hardly needs expensive parts for the PCB and cooling in reality.
Too many PC enthusiasts also need to think that piddling increases are not helping the gaming market.
It is great for companies - but if people are getting worse increases from cheaper cards or need to spend more and more to get performance increases,ie,the equivalent performance jump to the GTX670 over the GTX580 is not $400 but $600 to $700 now,it means either a lot of people will have slowish cards or ones keeping them longer and longer.
Remember if a gamer who spends £150 decides to spend £300,they probably will keep the card longer.
Nvidia has essentially jacked up the performance increase we got from the GTX580 to the GTX670 by 50% to 70% and not even inflation is that high.
In the end it means devs will still have to target a low performance base for PCs,and this is what is increasingly happening with PC only games,and the rest just generate far more income from consoles.
People complain that consoles are holding back PC gaming - it is the poorer and poorer increases we are getting with graphics cards which is doing that.
It is probably what happened with The Witcher 3 - why it was downgraded.
The dev probably realised with that level of image quality,hardly anybody with a gaming PC could run the game,so they made the graphics more in line with what the common cards could handle.