Most games don't make use of hardware flexibility. Pretty much all of them use the same technologies and that's even more true now with the move to PBR and the convergence to a handful of engines across the industry. Speed benefits the vast majority of games versus flexibility for just a few.
Nonsense. Most "standard" features today were anything but standard when the hardware of PS4/ONE were designed. Modern engines do use a lot of novel techniques that are only possible today thanks to the flexibility provided by these machines.
Dreams is just the most extreme example, where the whole rendering pipeline is compute based and foregoes even the most basic primitives typically used.
But there are other commercial games TODAY using SDF ray-tracing for parts of their rendering, like for example: Fortnite. Their large scale AO raytraces against an SDF representation of the scene constructed out of smaller SDF volumes. It is in fact a standard feature of UE4, and can be used for variable penumbra shadows too.
Similarly, all modern engines today are moving towards variable resolution deferred renders with temporal injection and reconstruction for upscaling and AA. None of that is a standard feature of GPUs, nor were they envisioned by GPU designers, they were clever software tricks developers were able to pull off within the constraints of DX9 level hardware initially, and really started flourishing now on the DX11/12 level machines of today.
For geometry processing, most big AAA engines are already doing things similar to mesh-shaders and NGG on consoles using compute because the API is less restrictive there (our own sebbbi was a pioneer in that front together with the devs of AC Unity). GPUs are actually catching up to an idea they probably wouldn't have had themselves were it not for devs experimentation.
Texture Space shading, and before that, Tiled Resources are the same thing. GPU designers took a look at what carmak (and our sebbbi again) had done with virtual texturing by software, and adapted their hardware design to empower such tech and make more viable and efficient.
Man, I could go on and on about software solutions no gpu engineer would have ever thought of if it were not for their designs having become flexible enough to make those ideas possible. Deferred rendering itself is one. POM. Virtually all Screen Space effects such as AO, SSS, Reflections, Specula Occlusion (very important component of RDR2's look), soft z-rested particles, gpu particles...
To me, the results look great and the performance runs fine on existing GPUs. That's a significant win, a great piece of tech, and a great early adoption of SDF which is far newer tech than raytracing (only 20 years old?).
