right ok i see what you are saying. nothing is worse than buying a new gpu these days as its scary to think it could be dated very quickly. if i was to take a wild guess then the 980ti should last many years and i can only really base that on the performance im still getting from the gtx 760.
im upgrading to gtx 970 very soon though.

if i was to take a wild guess about the 960 vs 780 then id take a guess at either

A) nvidia have not actually optimized drivers for their 7xx series or:
B) Nvidia have deliberately crippled the performance of the 7xx series in an effort to sell more new cards.

if the answer is going to be B then i dont think i will stick with Nvidia either to be perfectly honest as that just sucks if thats how they do business.
a gtx 960 should not be remotely close to the gtx 780.

I know it’s just a matter of luck/timing when you purchase a GPU but on Witcher 3 especially I find the comparative benchmarks between a 960 and a 780 a little disturbing.

I was thinking of upgrading to a 980 ti when they come out, but next year Maxwell will be replaced with Pascal so I don’t wanna be in a situation where a $200 gtx 1060 (or what ever it will be called) will match a $600 980 ti in benchmarks after just 12 months – what a waste of money that will be.

I guess for Nvidia it’s technological progress vs. consideration of the consumer – if Nvidia/developers keep leaping too far ahead the low-to high spec consumer can get a bit frustrated (the enthusiast is happy though).

Note: I understand Maxwell tessellation performance (amongst other things) is up to 3 x faster than Kepler.

The bottom line is, AMD’s tessellation performance has nothing to do with it. This is evidenced by the fact that you can use the AMD driver (Catalyst Control Center) to override the game’s settings and force 8x tessellation – and lo and behold, the HairWorks effects run beautifully, with less of an FPS hit than on Maxwell cards.

It’s almost as if the game detects the presence of an AMD card/driver, and deliberately gimps the performance in software – and CCC is overriding the gimping by overriding the game’s tessellation settings.

That’s not true about the tessalation as my gtx 760 runs it fine. I run it fine in every game in fact. The 760 is showing its age everywhere else though of course but I’m running the witcher 3 mostly high without game works and it runs fine for now, better than I expected from the gtx 760

Bottom line – Nvidias MAXWELL architecture is good for tessellation. If you have AMD or pre-Maxwell NVIDIA card you are dicked by Nvidia.

So a large percentage of Nvidia customers know how AMD feel right now.