BotW has very rudimentary and case by case physics.

It's still one of the only full-fledged games I can think of where elements such as temperature, electrical conductivity, air currents, etc are all woven together into a cohesive whole. I want games like that, just with even more extensive interactions.

Yeah, I want games like that as well - just with proper physics that is simulated completely on the world scale, not in limited and case by case fashion.

Well yeah, that kinda goes without saying, we are after all talking about CPUs dozens of times more powerful than the ancient tri-core PowerPC in the Wii U.

Path Tracing is Ray Tracing. Not all Ray Tracing is created equal... Games have been dipping their toes into the Ray Tracing waters for over a decade now to various degrees... It's being popularized now because of nVidia and what next-gen hardware might potentially bring to the table.

The biggest limitation to games currently is certainly lighting though, developers over the years have tried their best to 'fake' Ray tracing with baked lighting and so on which occurred heavily during the 7th gen.

I say reserve judgement until we see the games and hardware in action.

I don't think that really happened on the Xbox One X often though? I know a few titles did... But it was far from the norm really.

Well. No it can't... I have been over this a millions times on this forum... But I'll go again.

There are a ton of different types of compute workloads... Again we have 8bit, 16bit, 32bit, 64bit floating point and so on.
Then we have 8bit, 16bit, 24bit, 32bit, 64bit integers as well. - For example most GPU's don't have native 64bit integer support, so they emulate such functionality on the 32bit blocks... Which comes with a corresponding hit to performance.

And FLOPS only refers to one of those. 32bit floating point. Aka. Single Precision.

Not to mention that other parts of the chip come into play during pure compute workloads as well... For example the Geforce 1030 has a DDR4 and GDDR5 variant... In terms of compute there is only a difference of 6.5%. (1152Mhz vs 1227Mhz @384 Cuda cores.)
But the real world performance is often 50% or more slower.
https://www.gamersnexus.net/hwreviews/3330-gt-1030-ddr4-vs-gt-1030-gddr5-benchmark-worst-graphics-card-2018

Eutherium mining for example which tends to be a pure compute workload also sees significant gains with more memory bandwidth on the graphics card... Which just further emphasizes that flops is not a relevant capability measurement tool even between GPU's of the same architecture.

Global Foundries have stepped away from being in the fabrication process race... So they are out.
TSMC's 7nm+ is going to be leveraging EUV, so the designs won't just automatically translate over.

TSMC's 7nm+ is likely to only be a marginal improvement over 7nm anyway with 20% density improvements, 10% performance increase... Probably not worth making the gamble on that process for the next gen consoles monolithic chips. - Yields are stupidly important.

TSMC's capacity is also only going to be 1,000~ wafers per day... That can't all be reserved for the next gen consoles, other partners building ARM processors, GPU's and other pieces of logic will be jumping at that as well.

Samsungs 7nm process however will be employing EUV... But lets keep in mind that it's not the same as TSMC's 7nm+ process, don't fall into the trap of their marketing shenanigans... You can't compare Samsungs 7nm to TSMC's 7nm, marketing has made the comparisons useless on a number to number basis.
Both TSMC and Samsung will have up-to quad patterning for their fabs.

Is it possible that the next-gen consoles could use 7nm+? Yes. It's possible, it's just highly unlikely at this stage.

And yes Money is important for Microsoft and Sony, the more you spend on Chips and the production-of... The higher your costs become for designing and building a console which flows on to the consumer.
Long gone are the days where it's even financially feasible for console manufacturers to dump billions on designing chips for their devices... Sony and Microsoft have limits you know, which are generally governed by shareholder expectations.

I think myself and many others had hoped that the next-gen consoles would be targeting high-end GPU performance rather than the mid-range that the Xbox One and Playstation 4 eventually settled on to see a bigger leap in general fidelity.
Don't get me wrong, we will see a big leap, it's just not going to be as impressive as it could be... Partly that is down to AMD not being able to keep pace with nVidia's performance cadence.

Is it enough for a console? I would argue more is better.

But if you optimize for a Geforce 1080Ti, then the same performance gap between the GTX 1080 and 1080Ti will continue to exist.

Optimization isn't some magical construct that makes hardware more capable and excludes all other pieces of hardware.

The PC gets optimizations... I think console gamers forget this.
For example... Whenever AMD and nVidia roll out a driver update it's not just to make things look prettier or fix bugs... But to introduce optimizations that improve performance...
For example here we can see where optimizations improved performance by 15%.
https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/amd-nvidia-driver-updates-performance-tested,5707.html

Microsoft does a similar thing with Windows, which will often increase performance. For example:
https://www.techpowerup.com/255843/windows-10-may-2019-update-1903-gaming-performance-tested-in-21-titles-with-rtx-2080-ti-and-radeon-vii

And of course we have improvements at the API level:
https://www.redgamingtech.com/how-much-better-is-performance-with-modern-apis-directx-12-vs-directx-11-opengl-vs-vulkan/

And often game developers will roll out updates that also improve the performance of their title.
https://www.techspot.com/review/1759-ray-tracing-benchmarks-vol-2/

So obviously "optimizations" isn't just a console-only thing. - The evidence is simply undeniable at this point.

In short, there is absolutely no game that runs on a Playstation 4 that can't run on a Radeon 7870... Often, games will run better on a Radeon 7870 at the same visual settings as the Playstation 4 too... Like Overwatch, Battlefield 1, Grand Theft Auto 5 and so on.

Plus you get to choose your settings on the PC... Game doesn't run at full 1080P on the Playstation 4? Well, on a Radeon 7870 it can, just lower a couple of settings.

They could, but... People will whinge.
Price is a stupidly important factor for allot of people, especially for those who sit lower on the socio-economic ladder.
Remember the Xbox One at $500, remember the Playstation 3 at $600... They were all contentious price points.

We are still a long way away from a full ray traced gaming world, it might take a few more console generations for rasterization to fall away to the side.

Ray Tracing will be used on the 9th gen hardware, just like it is being used in some 8th gen games, it's the extent of it's use that is up for debate.

It's a value-added incentive. Not the be-all, end-all selling point.

Scarlett will be rolling out Xbox 360 and Original Xbox games in it's backwards compatibility efforts as well, hence why Microsoft pulled that team away from the Xbox One, will Sony do the same with Playstation 1, 2 and 3 backwards compatibility on the Playstation 5? Or would you deem it as unimportant?

I am not willing to place bets on how well any console is going to sell, my tastes don't align with the average consumer.

Good thing I provided a fairly comprehensive list where successive consoles launched with full backwards compatibility (In hardware!) yet didn't sell as well as their predecessor.

And as the evidence I provided earlier, backwards compatibility isn't actually a big selling point for most gamers, it's a value-added incentive, sure. But it's far from being the most important aspect... Otherwise everyone would be a PC gamer as you can run your PC games from 30~ years ago.

Yeah. I would dislike for the Xbox One X to be retained as any kind of model for the next-gen.
I don't see it happening though, the cooling set-up, power delivery and so on means it's not the most cost-effective device to build, it would need a significant cost-reduction revision if Microsoft intended to have it as a low-end alternative to next-gen.

I don't think 8 Teraflops is low at all.
I think why Teraflops wasn't mentioned earlier before RDNA became a "thing" was for this very reason, flops is irrelevant and they can't use it for marketing (like bits!) forever.

It's not even a ballpark figure, it's a theoretical denominator that is simply unachievable in the real world... Otherwise there wouldn't be a constant race to making chip designs more efficient every year...
I mean GPU's with more flops can end up slower than a GPU with less flops.
For example the Radeon 5870 @2.72 Teraflops is slower than the Radeon 7850 @ 1.76 Teraflops. - Almost 1 Teraflop less, but sometimes faster by almost 50%... And they have the same amount of bandwidth too. (153GB/s)
https://www.anandtech.com/bench/product/1062?vs=1076

Not to mention, the majority of people have absolutely no idea how FLOPS even pertains to the rendering of a games world anyway.

Downsampling/Supersampling means that 4k can look better on a 1080P display than native 1080P content on a 1080P display.
We are far from the point of photorealism in gaming even at 720P... Which means it's still possible to showcase differences.

The real crutch is that the Xbox and Playstation consoles are getting closer and closer in terms of capability that it's really unimportant unless you are an enthusiast... And let's face it, if you gave that much of a shit about hardware, chances are that you are part of the PC Gaming Master Race anyway.

I can't say how much happier GTS made me against GT5 and 6 on the loading times, more so on restart.

Sport mode is still slow though. For example race entry ends at 3:30, matching begins at 3:31, track loads for a minute or more then a minute wait, actual race starts at 3:34. Then you do one race and it has to load everything again doh.

Offline is a lot faster, still some things take forever. I now have liveries for all GR.3 and GR.4 cars and a few others. The car selection screen can show blanks for up to 5 minutes before it has all the thumbnails loaded...

Any patch takes over 35 minutes to install because it has to copy the whole game over again regardless of download speed. Starting the game still takes 2 minutes before you're entered into a race. It's all still pretty slow. (ps4 pro with stock hdd)