Yeah
People laughed at megatextures at the time, but Carmack was totally right back in the day about virtualization of GFX pipeline functions like textures and shadows (Carmack has said VSMs were on the board for idtech 6 before he left).
We're just now getting to the point it's absolutely necessary, though. Traditional methods of doing these things just don't scale fast enough anymore to be worth it.
Yeah the reality is that people are going to buy NV pretty much no matter what these days. Their lead at this point is like, 80%+ of the market....AMD is thus not really in competition with NV; they're more in competition with Intel, if anything. With the rumors lately that AMD is going to release a single midrange card next Gen and that is all, it's kind of hard to blame NV at this point...when the "competition" doesn't even try anymore, you just charge whatever the market will bare. I fully expect the 50 series, especially the ~5070s and up, to be even more expensive than the 40 series is for this reason, and guess what? People will still buy them so....๐คทโโ๏ธ
AMD can undercut the hell out of NV, but it just results in Nvidia shrugging, dropping like 10% higher to where AMDs prices are, and gamers thank AMD then buy the NV card.