It's also worth noting that - clock-speeds and resultant TFLOPs aside - the specs for RX 480 are point-for-point a match for the GPU in Sony's upcoming PlayStation Neo, all but confirming that the Sony mid-gen console refresh uses both Polaris technology and the new 14nm FinFET chip manufacturing process.

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2016-amd-rx-480-costs-199-gtx-970-r9-390-beating-performance

Remember AMD has 100% marketshare in the console space and a strong plan to push for the mainstream PC space now. They have Vulkan API on PC and consoles, which is why they are in an unique position to facilitate paralel development of games to the bulk of the market. I suspect the days of Nvidia bruteforcing and bullying their position in the market are about to be over.

Actually I hope Vulkan will become the industry standard API. The time for closed APIs has come and gone, good riddance (yes I'm looking at you Direct X)

Vulkan isn't on the Xbox one.

Direct X is actually a good API, certainly had the leg up on OpenGL for allot of years, it's funny that AMD would be the one to jump start an almost "API Revolution" with Mantle though, allot of what made Mantle what it was is going to influence design philosophy's in Vulkan and Direct X... And even Mobile with Apple's Metal API.

I do hope that AMD can take marketshare from nVidia and especially Intel.
I just see it as an uphill battle as even when they had multiple design wins like Wii and Xbox 360 and were beating nVidia in regards to performance with the Radeon 4000/5000 series... They still never managed to get relevent marketshare, heck they still struggled to be profitable.
Even when the Athlon XP/64/64 X2 was dominating Intel in almost every performance metric, AMD was still irrellevent in terms of marketshare.

With that said, we need to consider Hand Helds and Mobile, which AMD doesn't really have any kind of presence in. (Unless you count Adreno?) There are a surprisingly large amount of cross platform titles in that segment.

I am a pretty loyal AMD customer though, with their GPU's at-least, they tend to have the superior multi-monitor support which is imporant to me.

nVidia has taken note of async compute, they were stubborn to update their GPU's to take advantage of the spec. (Like they were with Tessellation/Direct X 11/Direct X 10.1)
nVidia also petitions/works with AMD and Microsoft and even Intel when it comes to the Direct X spec, so it's not like they were ignorant of things. :P

But even when nVidia was behind technologically, nVidia still had the largest marketshare and one could say they "sabotaged" performance and features for AMD, like Asassins Creed's Direct X 10.1 path, nVidia was still stuck on Direct X 10, AMD had a performance advantage on the games release, but that was patched away.

AMD simply doesn't have the resources or connections in the industry that nVidia has nor does it have the marketing budget or marketshare, so it's driver extensions will likely never gain the same kind of industry support that AMD has, which is sad because things like TressFX is amazing.

That is the point I was trying to make. 

Backwards compatability isn't always black and white and clear cut, even in the PC space things change, but unlike consoles software isn't written as closely to the hardware, relying on all it's particular nuances, that kinda complicates backwards compatability.
In say 10 years, who is to guarentee that you could drop a PS4 disc into the PS5 and have it executed natively? This is the assumption many people assume because the PS4 is using pretty standard x86 hardware.

How exactly does AMD not have the connections ? Literally EVERY major ISV relations teams works with the game developers including AMD ... 

There's no reason to hold the absolutely pessimistic view that AMD's driver extensions will never get into games when similar built-ins are already used on consoles and with shader model 6 coming in the near future it too will expose more functionality already found on consoles ... 

As a sidenote I prefer hairworks to TressFX ...

Backwards compatibility seems more likely than ever since GPU microarchitectures are converging more closely than ever since DirectX12 is practically designed to last around the 3 major IHVs ... 

I agree that it's fallacious to assume backwards compatibility with just the ISA in CPUs but in the most likely upcoming case I'd say backwards compatibility comes down to the API design like whether or not they exposed GPU microcode ... 

Vulkan isn't on Xbox 1, but AMD is, all APUs are AMD made, that's what I meant by having 100% console marketshare, which is where the real gaming profits come from to publishers. Apparently DX12 was heavily influenced by Mantle and Vulkan, which is why in early benches we had AMD cards with massive performance gains while the NVIDIA gpus were pretty much at a standstill.

I agree that it would be important for AMD to take some marketshare from both Nvidia and Intel on the pc space, at the very least so we could have some real competition. I do dislike Direct X the same way that I dislike all closed APIs, it's basically the way Microsoft has to remain the default option for any gamer on the PC. I'd love to see some real competition there too so people wouldn't be forced to keep windows in order to game on PC. That will only happen if the industry standard API will be an open one (like OpenGL was back when it was relevant still).

UGHHH! I hope it's not a seperate console or i swear... im gonna be so piss. They should make this "NEO" integrated with the original PS4 so that it can make the PS4 more powerful, now that's awesome and i would buy it day-1. No BS.

nVidia will actually donate "code" to publishers and developers like Ubisoft, Activision etc'.
nVidia "The way it's meant to be played" Slogan is pretty common in games (I.E. Almost every single unreal powered game for the last generation!), that's advertising right there, AMD has never really been able to capture that with it's "gaming evolved" slogan to the same degree as nVidia, nVidia just has Billions in the bank to get the market to play to it's strengths.

AMD did a similar thing with EA and Battlefield and Square Enix and Tomb Raider, but those efforts seem to have fizzled and not really anything new has happened on that front, AMD seems to just be reacting and copying nVidia, albeit making it's stuff open-source which is great for the industry!

I am basing all this on history of course, things might be different this time around, but I tend to be pessimistic in regards to AMD, it's why I never got burned on Phenom 1 or Bulldozer, Radeon 2000 series. etc'. :P

Pretty sure the Microcode has been exposed in the low-level API's, which really are only going to be used in games that push the graphics envelope and have big budgets.
Where the high-level API's such as Direct X 11, 12, OpenGL on the PS4/Xbox One have such things "hidden" for ease of development.

Also there appears to be some relevance to the date October 3rd though not sure whether it's Neo or PSVR related.

Who's to say AMD hasn't done the same ? DICE already uses AMD driver extensions and I'm sure there's others as well ... 

There's no reason to believe that consoles don't influence optimizations at the engine level (there are DX11 games that AMD has an advantage in) or at the API level (async compute) ... 

The last generation was a different story since the ATI Hollywood practically had a DX7 feature set and hardly any AAA games from the sub-HD twins were ever developed on it. Yes, the Xenos used VLIW5 but there were a lot of modifications when AMD used it on PCs and DX10 was extremely shortlived compared to DX11 ...

It's pretty extreme to expose GPU ISA microcode when most performance can be had by using something similar to HLSL with custom shader intrinsics. A good shader compiler can help too ...