Fermi was given the nickname "Thermi" for a good reason. AMD marketing had a field day: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2QkyfGJgcwQ
It didn't help that the heatsink of the GTX 480 resembled the surface of a grill: https://i.imgur.com/9YfUifF.jpg
Vega's marketing pushed Nvidia to make what is ending up to be the best product series they will ever make: series 10. That isn't much of a joke, it scared the shit out of Nvidia, and they blinked.
Vega was too late in the pipeline to stop, and Raja was ultimately let go for his role in the whole thing. He refused to start making more gamer-friendly cards, and was obsessed with enterprise compute/jack of all trades cards.
Immediately afterwards was a pivot towards a split arch, allowing multiple teams to pursue their intended markets.
Its why AMD won against Nvidia. Nvidia still has no real answer to AMD's success, other than continuing to increase card prices and making ridiculously large chips that have poor wafer yields. Nvidia won't even have working chiplets until series 60 or 70, while AMD already has them in a shipping product.
Won how?
>Nvidia still has no real answer to AMD's success
Which success? Answer to what? Are you from a paralel multiverse?
In this reality, it's the other way around. Nvidia is making so much money from the AI hype than AMD is the one trying to play catch-up.
Nvidia strongly missed the boat by continually pushing CUDA lock in, while being on the Khronos steering committee and having made important contributions to OpenGL, OpenCL, Vulkan, and the SPIR-V ecosystem while simultaneously having pretty poor support for standard APIs in their software stack.
Highest perf per watt and perf per dollar is AMD land. AMD keeps moving fowards while Nvidia keeps making weird missteps. There is a reason why I said series 10 is the best they will ever make, there will never be a return to that: they're stuck in the same loop Raja was: make everything bigger for the sake of bigger, instead of making actual performance improving changes.
To each their own, I guess.
The cost of doing business that isn't flops is the realm of developer time. Nvidia tooling is where developer time goes to die. People who keep claiming Nvidia's tooling is great for developers and easy to use is someone who has a skill mismatch for the industry, or worse, someone trying to sell you something.