Things have evolved to paint a better picture now that AMD is having an active participation in the CPU and discrete graphics market. AMD Radeon VEGA had its flaws. There are also issue relating its availability and non-reference editions. Regardless, the RX Vega 56 was enough to spook Nvidia. As a result, we see the GTX 1070 Ti.

Competition of any kind is good for the consumers!

While it is placed between two variants, GTX 1070 Ti seems closer towards GTX 1080's performance. This is why they do not to allow its AIC partners to sell factory overclocked graphics cards. It is based on the Pascal architecture GP104 core using the 16nm FinFET process manufactured by TSMC. Unlike the GTX 1080, the GTX 1070 Ti uses GDDR5 memory chips. Nothing is stopping you from manual overclocking.