Yep. I've considered returning my 970 and getting a 290 instead but I had a bad experience with an AMD card before and I don't want to go down that road again. Nvidia's support is just much better. And even though the 970 isn't what I paid for, I'm still happy with it for now, so I'm just going to keep it and learn a hard lesson for the future.
same. Too noisy, poor downsampling support. And the 290X is more expensive than the 970 in Europe - US might be different.
An Nvidia sanctioned step up program letting us upgrade to 980s for a discount would be attractive to me.