Although Nvidia's new GTX 1080 might be the likely performance king for the foreseeable future, AMD is looking to offer cards that are comparable in performance to its last-gen high-end GPUs, but at a much more competitive price.
Specs wise it's not too dissimilar to an R9 390, but it uses the new 14nm process for its GPU so will perform slightly better and have much improved efficiency. We don't have a solid idea on overall performance, as AMD has only released optimised Ashes of the Singularity numbers (which admittedly show two of them beating out a much more expensive GTX 1080), but an educated guess would peg these as a little more powerful than the aforementioned 300 series card.
The big selling point of these cards though is that the price tag is just $200. That means a nice, custom, overclocked one with a better cooler could only be $250 - that's a very cheap way to get your system ready for VR if that's what you're excited for.
AMD has plans for the Vega cards in the future, which could well offer something more competitive at the top of performance with Nvidia, but in the meantime it still has the reasonably powerful Fury X and the monstrous Radeon Pro Duo to offer something to those with deep pockets and a disliking for Nvidia.
Out of the new Pascal and Polaris cards announced, which one do you like the look of the most?
