Have to look at this historically to understand the design concept differences between AMD and nVidia ... for a while there competition was tight ... then came the 7xx series, AMD needed a comeback, they couldn't do it in the design, so thay marketed their way into appearing to compete. nVidia knew the situation going in ... few pundits notices the things were "off" in the 700 series when they were finally released. The 780 upon release matched up with the leaked 770 specs. and so on. Some speculated that nVidia took the original 770 design and make that the 780 at retail. The original 780 design was placed on the shelf to gather dust.
When the AMD 2xx series came out, nVidia execs were grinning ear to ear. They sat quiet until a week before the release with hundreds of articles showing "leaked" specs and bencmarks beating the 780..... Then Vidia dropped the bomb a week before announcing the 780. All that money spent on the ad campaign for 2xx was deflated as the 780 Ti was now on top. But.... then came the in depth looks. It turned out the the 2xx series was runing > 95C ... suggesting that overclocking would be very limited... it was. Turned out that the 780 OCd was significantly faster than the 290x OC'd and that left nVidia w/ the two top tiers .
Since then, we've seen green cards OC as much as 32% .... usually minimum in the mid teens (15%). So why doen't nVidia just put higher clocks "in the box". Remeber the silicon lottery ... I had an EVGA card way back when that I made 20 support calls, had 5 RMAs and never ran at advertised speeds. When you allow for significant OC, it's pretty much a given that only a teeny % of them will fail to meet the advertised speeds. Therefore RMA rates are small. Staring with the 290 and each generation since, AMD had had to go with higher clocks in the box because with corresponding OC headroom ... they appear to compete. With every generation of cards since.... we see hand picked games performing better then nVidi acard in the proce range .... and why not. If reviewers are going o publish only out of box speeds, then the "overclocked in the box" alternative will do much better.the 480 / 580 appeared to compete with the 1060 ... but not when both cards overclocked.... the 5700 XT was supposed to compete with the 2080, but it doesn't catch 2070- with both cards overclocked.
With each new generation, we take Wiz's test results, component descriptions (which GPU, whiuch VRNM, which memory, etc and apply the OCs to both cards so as to provide "apples to apples" comparisons. I undestand the strategy ... I just hate having to do all the math to see the performance that once can expect in the manner most will use their card
