That's also another good option. I've heard AMD's drivers are much improved and give better results with racing sims now.I'm probably going to grab an R9 280 3GB as that's as far as my budget will extend this year, at about £130UKP. There is no better card for the same money - I checked carefully at Tom's Hardware and other benchmarking sites.
lots of time to look around. wife said she would buy me a new card for Christmas, so hopefully will be able to find a good deal on something around then.
They do draw more power at times, but I'll happily argue with the heat comments. Only the top R9 290 gets hotter than the NVidia Titan. The R9 280 runs cooler than a GTX750, GTX660, etc.
Power consumption and thermal test
The GTX 980 doesn't make much sense at all. Yes, it's the fastest card but the price is significantly higher than a 970 yet performance is only marginally better. In fact, as far as I'm aware the 970 can be overclocked to 980 speeds quite easily.
The GTX 970 has not only killed the competition from AMD, it's also made Nvidia's own flagship card look rather pointless.