From Eurogamer:
"The GeForce GTX 970 is that rarest of things in the graphics card market - a genuine game-changer. In fact, it's actually more like a cooked hand grenade strategically lobbed into the high-end GPU market, designed to cause maximum damage to the competition - but in the process impacting just as many Nvidia cards too. It costs £260, which is a lot of money, but its performance per pound ratio is so strong that some might say there's little point considering any other high-end GPU currnetly available - and that includes Nvidia's own flagship GTX 980."
I'm sure it's the same in the US as in the UK
"The headlines are this: AMD's R9 290 and top-line R9 290X - £300 and £400 GPUs respectively - are effectively obsolete: hot, power-hungry, inefficient products that are effortlessly bested by Nvidia's £260 upstart. Nvidia is caught in the blast radius itself too - the GTX 780 is history, while the 780 Ti - a card that sold for over £500 just a few months - is also bordering on the irrelevant. Overclocked, the GTX 970 also beats the stock performance of the £430 GTX 980 in most applications too - a phenomenal showing bearing in mind that the latter is 65 per cent more expensive."