It’s already Nvidia or nothing. There’s no point fighting with Nvidia in the high end corner because unless you can beat Nvidia in performance there’s no winning with the high end cards. People who buy high end cards don’t care about a slightly worse and slightly cheaper card because they’ve already chosen to pay premium price for premium product. They want the best performance, not the best bang for the buck. The people who want the most bang for the buck at the high end are a minority of a minority.

But on the other hand, by dropping high end cards AMD can focus more on making their budget and mid-range cards better instead of diverting some of their focus on the high end cards that won’t sell anyway. It increases competition in the budget and mid-range section and mid-range absolutely needs stronger competition from AMD because Nvidia is slowly killing mid-range cards as well.