Navi Made in Colab with sony, MS still Using it?

[fatslob-:O]

Pemalite said:

Well it does matter to a degree. Always has.
If all the 8th gen consoles had Rapid Packed Math for example, then developers would use it, but sadly that isn't the case as it wasn't bolted onto Graphics Core Next until after the 8th gen base consoles launched.

Then the argument should be about features instead of the architecture. No reason why we couldn't opt in for hardware extensions for the same effect ... 

Pemalite said:

Turing is actually more efficient than Pascal on a SM to SM based comparison... However, Turing introduced allot of new hardware designed for other tasks... Once games start to leverage Ray-Tracing more abundantly, then Turing's architecture will shine far more readily.

It's a chicken before the egg scenario.

Whether nVidia's approach was the right one... Still remains to be seen. Either way, AMD still isn't able to match Turing, despite Turing's pretty large investment in non-rasterization technologies that takes up a ton of die space... Which is extremely telling.

Higher performance per SM came at an expense of 40%+ larger die area compared to it's predecessor so Nvidia is not as flawless as you seem to believe in their execution of efficiency ... 

As far as ray tracing is concerned, there's no reason to believe that either AMD or Intel couldn't one up whatever Turing has because there's still potential improve it with new extensions such as traversal shaders, more efficient acceleration structures, and beam tracing! It's far from guaranteed that Turing will be built for the future of ray tracing when the yet to be released new consoles could very well obsolete the way games design ray tracing around Turing hardware with a possibly superior feature set ... 

Turing invested equally just as much elsewhere such as tensor cores, texture space shading, mesh shaders, independent thread scheduling, variable rate shading, and some GCN features (barycentric coordinates, flexible memory model, scalar ops) are all things that can directly enhance rasterization as well so it's just mainstream perception that overhypes it's focus towards ray tracing ... 

There's other ways to bloat Nvidia's architectures in the future with features from consoles they still haven't adopted like global ordered append and shader specified stencil values ...

Pemalite said:

Well. It's only early days yet. Turing is only the start of nVidia's efforts into investing in Tensor Cores.

In saying that... Routing FP16 through the Tensor cores has one massive advantage... It means that Turing can dual issue FP16 and FP32/INT32 operations at the same time, allowing the Warp Scheduler another option to keep the SM partition busy working.

So there is certainly a few "Pro's" to the "Con's" you have outlaid.

Tensor cores are pretty much DOA since consoles won't be adopting it and AMD aren't interested in the idea either. Not a surprise since there's hardly any applications for it beyond image post-processing and even then it doesn't provide a clear benefit over existing methods ... 

Compared to double rate FP16 in shaders which are far more flexible and can be used for many other things including post-processing such as water rendering, ambient occlusion, signed distance fields collision for hair physics ... 

I don't think the real-time graphics industry is headed into the direction of tensor cores since there's very few compelling use cases for it ...

Pemalite said:

In some instances the GTX 1070 pulls ahead of the Xbox One X and sometimes rather significantly. (Remember I also own the Xbox One X.)
Often the Xbox One X is matching my old Radeon RX 580 in most games... No way would I be willing to say it's matching a 1070 across the board though... Especially when the Xbox One X is generally sacrificing effects for resolution/framerate.

Generally speaking you're going to need a GTX 1070 to get the same experience as the X1X is pretty definitively ahead of the GTX 1060 in the same settings and by extension the RX 580 as well ...

Pemalite said:

I would place the Playstation 4 at more than 4x faster. It has far more functional units at it's disposal, granted Maxwell is also a far more efficient architecture... The Playstation 4 also has clockspeed and bandwidth on it's side.

I am surprised the Switch gets as close as it does to be honest.

From a GPU compute perspective the PS4 is roughly ~4.7x faster, the same with texture sampling depending on formats but it's geometry performance is just a little over 2x faster than the Switch so it's not totally a slam dunk in theoretical performance since developers need to use some features like async compute to mask the relatively low geometry performance ... 

The Switch get's as 'close' (still can't run many AAA games) as it does since NV's driver/shader compiler team desire to take responsibility for performance so it doesn't matter what platform you develop on for Nvidia hardware when their whole entire software stack is more productive ...  

For AMD, on the PC side they can't change practices as that easily so I can only imagine their envy for Sony to be able to shove a whole new gfx API down every developers throat ...