I'm suggesting two things in terms of ray tracing in games:
- fuzzy (low res, low update rate) but amazingly comprehensive console ray tracing with low-level voodoo
- comprehensive brute force pristine PC ray tracing
NVidia won't be standing still and AMD needs >2x uplift to avoid looking bad versus NVidia and what ever wizadry the consoles have.
I don't expect anyone to stand still.
I'm fully expecting for Nvidia to use their richer developer influence to push for #2 as hard as they can because that's where they have an architectural advantage, and for AMD to focus on "console-multipliers" in the expectation that #1 is widely adopted.
Not much different than Nvidia pushing for more geometry\tessellation in PC games during the Kepler + Maxwell + Pascal eras, while AMD iterated relatively little from GCN1 to GCN4 because the optimization for both consoles was on their side.
I'm aware that AMD "lost" with their strategy, but I don't think it was the strategy's fault.
The HD 7970 eventually did leapfrog over the the GTX 680 in multiplatform game performance, despite
the latter having a massive advantage in geometry performance.
It's just that AMD's execution on chip performance (clocks) and release dates was pretty terrible compared to Nvidia's. They failed to do >1GHz on TSMC 28nm and then with Globalfoundries' 14nm they screwed up clock performance pretty badly, at least compared to Nvidia+TSMC.
Comparing the 40CU 6700xt and 80CU 6900xt there was a 75% improvement on paper but only 50% in actual gaming numbers. This leads me to believe the 6700xt is benefiting from higher clocks on its fixed function hardware or the 6900xt is hitting a bandwidth wall.
Probably both but more of the latter? The 6700 XT clocks ~12% higher than the 6900 XT on average. The VRAM bandwidth-per-WGP and LLC-amount-per-WGP (and probably the LLC bandwidth too) are all 50% higher on Navi 22 vs. Navi 21.
OTOH, it doesn't look like Navi 22 is losing all that much from halving the number of Shader Engines, which might be an indicator why Navi 3x is reducing the SEs in general (or increasing the WGPs per SE).