WOW! Nvidia must have known that these cards will shred the Titan Z to pieces, but they said, well, we still have a good chip in here, let's build a dual chip behemoth while we still can, and ask whatever price we want. From the prices I see however, those 499$ for a 290X must be in the US as on newegg.ca a respectable model with good reviews is still 10% more expensive than that number. And for AMD, the only situation where a user would go with a 295X2 instead of a couple of GTX980s would be if he would a have a mini itx setup, as at 4K the difference in price and performance between the 2 options is kinda the same, 295X2 is 8% behind in performance, and like 9% cheaper. I don't think we need to bother with the efficiency aspect : I have never seen a hardcore gamer caring about the electricity bill when he can afford a 2000$ game system. Also, Mantle, is not even worth mentioning as it is almost ineffective on the CPUs today's gamers use, Mantle works well on an i3 or an Athlon II x4, or on the AMD CPU architectures, Piledriver/Steamroller and not on Intel CPUs gamers use. In plus with DX12 on the horizon, that will be hardware agnostic and offering the same promises of low level acces to hardware as Mantle does only for GCN cards, I would say Mantle is something done too little, too late.
