Yeah, I know, dealing with the devil on both sides.
Just as one of the forum members post it, when nVidia and AMD does something awesome, they also do something equally un-awesome as well... Newton's law of expectation I guess...
In my situation I went to the company that would offer me a product most closely resembles the experience I am looking for, in this case it's nVidia. As much as I don't like how they handled the 970 RAM segmentation issue, but AMD is not exactly offering a product up to par right now. 290x is great card in raw power, driver is just lacking, Xfire profiles even worse.
The way I concluded was, 970 still has 4GB VRAM, and that 0.5GB VRAM is still a good bit faster than dumping the data onto the system RAM instead, and the chances of games that land right in between 3.5GB and 4GB is not going to often at all, and probably will only require turning down a few details to alleviate. It is because of this 0.5GB ram that I have decided to stand by 970's, and avoid 980's even more. In the light of the VRAM issue, and reports that games are hitting this VRAM mark, I am of the opinion that 980 won't have that much longer, 0.5GB VRAM isn't going to 'futureproof' 980's for very long, especially we are still in the console transition period, so VRAM requirements will probably creep up eventually.
If I were in a market for new card now, I would definitely settle for nothing less than 6GB.