You would never use 16-wide WGs in practice because half of threads would remain idle.
If i understood this correctly, RDNA can fill its SIMDs faster with new work, which matters after switching shaders, so also if shaders are short, and if lots of stuff is to schedule (e.g. async compute).
Maybe it also matters after switching WGs because of a wait on VRAM access, texture fetch, RT, etc. Would be a huge win then.
On GCN this takes longer because the pipelining of 64 threads over 16-wide SIMDs. RDNA with 32 threads and 32-wide SIMDs can fill those SIMDs twice as fast.
A downside is higher latency. Many instructions take 4 cycles on GCN, but 5 on RDNA.
But i'm really not sure about any of this!
That's another topic. Indeed i don't like tabletop mechanics in realtime video games, because it means GUI interface clutter not conforming the reality simulation going on beside that. So i have ignored the RPG genre as a whole and expect some issues on my side with playing CP.
But obviously it implements all FPS mechanics: Free roam of 3D world, and shooting at enemies which shoot back. And even ignoring the RPG mechanics, i can judge this implementation is bad and way below to what other modern (console) games achieve.
To address aiming does not work so well using gamepads, there are many options:
Aim Assist. See a style shooter like Deathloop does not even have a crosshair. Just like Doom had no crosshair because it had no mouselook yet.
Cover shooter. Solving the problem by alternating movement and shooting.
Melee mechanics. Button mash to attack close enemies, not requiring aim.
Special abilities. See Dishonored, Control, etc. Usually married with the style shooter genre.
But all of those solutions have issues, which are mostly annoying to me:
Aim Assist: No problem with that, but game ends up too shallow and simple, so to add some challenge, we add some of the other mechanics as well.
Cover Shooter: Disables free roam. Constatly i get sucked into some cover, then i'm trapped into that cover and try to break free, ending up doing movements i did not intend.
Melee: That's just too dumb to be fun, mostly.
Special abilities: I have to learn them, remember buttons, and when i come back to the game weeks later i have it all forgotten. I hate it - it's a bolt on cancer. Remembering Controls levitation mode where you're intended to control flying up and flying down with just one button gives me the creeps. I've fallen to death more often than not.
So, in short, it's all a form of complexity bloat. I want simple controls, and complexity should manifest in the games world and challenges, not in GUI pages or by mastering combos of a dozen of buttons.
If Doom Eternal had a 'Classic' mode, without glory kills and stuff, just simple but challenging shooting, i would replay this game 5 times. As is, i won't, although i'd actually like to. Not willing to relearn its mechanics again.
It's not about shooting. The best genre of recent years to me was indie horror, as invented from Frictional Games Penumbra or Amnesia. Those games have no shooting at all, but free roam and interaction with a properly simulated and interactive world, and this gives great immersion, which is what i'm after.
So actually i think to evolve games respecting all platforms, i would sacrifice that 'shooting' all together, or tone it down. But if we do so, it turns out too quickly game worlds are just smoke and mirrors and not interesting enough on its own. Thus my believe in pushing physics to lift the technical base here.
