2) I'm all for AMD to kick Nvidia's ass in compute and end cuds's reign but it won't sell gaming cards. Vega FE (A 1000$ card) is out for a month and I haven't seen anyone benchmark it and show that it's better, Even if games will use it there is a heck of a difference between building the model and running inference.
The next generation of games could potentially utilise compute functionality, especially if Microsoft and Sony get off their arses and push the capability on consoles.
(That said, porting such software to a PC environment would not be withouut significant difficulty, given the vastly different memory configuration.)
I'll be hugely disappointed in the industry if we don't see some decent Vulcan based game engines in the next few years.
You should check Tech Report's Frame Time Analysis:
http://techreport.com/review/31546/where-minimum-fps-figures...
Benchmarking software should do more to provide a clean and meaningful representation of the distribution of performance - people care more about a card's worst case than its best or average.
Another significant consideration - as alluded to in the TensorFlow comment - is the compute performance.
Although compute performance is not yet that important from a gaming perspective, I would be rather surprised not to see some games start to utilise it for engine functionality - especially after Vulcan and OpenCL merge.
Wait to see the performance of the card as a whole, and consider the implications for the next generation before you declare the card a non-starter and evolutionary dead-end.