to name a few....

wolfenstein: new order (especially this game. low vram at high settings will cause the texture popping issue which is a very obvious and annoying effect where images when loading is blurred only to suddenly pop in after load. It becomes disorienting.)

shadow of mordor (if you think 4gb vram is enough, well this game needs 6gb vram to max out it's ultra settings.

http://www.kitguru.net/gaming/matthew-wils...ultra-settings/  )
Why players should be upset having 3.5gb rather than the promised 4gb vram
http://www.guru3d.com/news-story/middle-ea...ess-test,7.html
So if the market has a 4gb vram card, why settle with 3.5gb ? Especially considering some of the graphics intensive games we know are very demanding in regards to vram.

More so for gamers such as myself who buy the highest end graphics card expecting to then be able to play in ultra settings. This is where vram becomes important for this ultra settings to become playable.

And this is not yet even considering people who bought the 970 bought it thinking it was a 4gb, but instead later found out it's 3.5gb Which is blatant false advertising, and already lawyers are contemplating a lawsuit against nvidia because of it.

You are only looking at the surface. It's not uncommon that the most recent PC titles are terrible and unoptimized, that even if you have 980/TitanBlack/780Ti or SLI configs, you still can't run the game at its maximum settings.

Games auto detecting "best setting" has NEVER been accurate. I turn SoM on with a 970 SLI config and it detects 720p with medium settings for me on a 1440p screen. If you call that "best", then wow...
SoM isn't the only game that does it, pretty much every single game I've played since the last 6 years has this issue.

Most likely after R9-390x is out, or should I say "obviously" 

Get a 980 then.

Both the HoF and Gaming are good cards. The HoF is on paper better though, but according to many owners of the HoF 980, they haven't been happy with their card especially for the price premium over the other 980s. Reason being that the HoF isn't as unlocked and off the rails as much as enthusiasts would like it (people who buy HoF editions generally are those who OC the juices out of the card).

Mod the vbios and you can really pull some serious OC numbers out of the HoF though, assuming you get a good chip that is.