AMD Polaris comes out tomorrow, which should meet VR minimum specs and will be a lot cheaper.

If it doesn't meet VR minimum specs then AMD has really missed a golden opportunity that nVidia handed them. The prestige is in the high end cards, the money is in the mainstream & mobile ones.

VR's steep requirements plus the really nice performance bump we're getting from finally getting off of 28nm means that this is probably going to be one of the most vigorous upgrade cycles for GPUs that we've seen in a while.

I'm not going to be able to warm up to AMD until they get their OpenGL drivers' performance up to par with NVIDIA. It's such a big deal breaker for me, as someone who actively uses OpenGL for both applications and development.

AMD is never going to get their OGL driver up to par with Nvidia's. That's why they created Mantle and are enthusiastic about Vulkan/DX12. It gets them off the hook to make and maintain those drivers.

Whoever decided to save a buck back at ATI and not hire a massive driver development team a couple decades ago did irreparable harm.

Interesting that they're starting with a mainstream part. I hope this becomes a trend since the mainstream part is the only one I'm ever really interested in every generation (as my gaming needs are rather modest, and currently served adequately by a GTX 750 TI).

I was planning on waiting for a mainstream version of the 1070/1080 from NVIDIA to use in a Thunderbolt graphics dock with a Thunderbolt 3 compatible ultrabook, which is a setup that, I assume, will be far more limited by the ultra low voltage CPU in the ultrabook than any mainstream graphics card from this next generation anyways. But it looks like Polaris might fit the bill and release sooner.

Have you had any experience using a graphics dock? I was talking about it the other day and while it seems like a nice idea I've yet to encounter anyone who's actually used one and can speak to how good compatibility is.

Up to this point graphics docks have either been hacked together or proprietary one-offs, so they're not widely used. Standardized TB3 graphics docks are coming very soon though.

https://youtu.be/vGFRoWj0YOw?t=181

Compatibility wise they're supposed to work with any laptop that has Thunderbolt 3, supports the Intel eGPU UEFI extension, and is running Windows 10.

My Surface Book is effectively that (the better GPU is in the detachable half) and compatibility is perfect (once had an issue where a game used the wrong card, detached and reattached and it was all fine, drivers have updated since then) - admittedly that's a system where everything is first-party and designed to work that way.

$500 is too big price for "high-end" class video card? We are living in different worlds.