I know those estimations, but I don't really believe them unless he shows what exactly he calculated there. Unless he just gave the pure production costs of each part and added those together, without taking any margins into account, I find those numbers very hard to believe.

Why do you keep using quotes that are biased to your agenda and absolutely doesnt show any kind of context?.

For instance a user could still run Dishonored 2 at 1440P with a gtx1060 with everything on ultra with a mix of some less noticeable settings from High/medium settings and i bet if you showed the average user both they wouldnt be able to tell the difference. 

Not everything has to be all Ultra or medium settings you know. Thats the great thing about game engines this days, they are all build to scale.

1. AMD is a generation behind nVidia for the most part though.
nVidia will have second generation ray tracing hardware this year, which will likely correspond with a significant increase in compute hardware to tackle the problem and efficiency gains.

2. 720P vs 900P is a difference of 56.25% which is more than the theoretical "30%" performance difference. (Which is why flops is bullshit.)

3a. The price isn't in the Teraflops.

50% wider memory bus, requires more PCB layers, more intricate power delivery.
Some variants have 50% more memory as well.

The real cost is in the die size... The RX 5600 is from a die-harvested RX 5700, where-as the RX 5500 is built from it's own smaller, cheaper die that is 58.8% smaller.

So in reality... The RX 5500 should be 50% cheaper than the RX 5600 due to the roughly 50% decrease in all the hardware, but that is generally not the case... Often seeing a 75% price discrepancy between the two parts in Oceania.

3b. PC costs and Console costs tend to be a little different.
Microsoft and Sony buy in bulk which can be a significant price reduction, plus they get their own contracts done for fabrication.

There is also part consolidation, GPU's on PC's for instance have their own power delivery and RAM, on consoles that is all shared with the other components.

Plus you have the profit margins, AMD tries to retain a 64% or higher profit margin... But that really depends on how performant they are relative to nVidia and what markets they are chasing... AMD's semi-custom division tends to get lump sums with licensing revenue, totally different pricing structure.

And of course you have the die-size vs clock frequency part of the equation, having a smaller chip that can clock higher can mean more Teraflops, but also cheaper than the part it replaces, we saw this often with AMD's evolution of Graphics Core Next where they constantly re-balanced hardware every year.

I know I said I'll leave this thread but its too irksome to read this and not respond lol

You cannot arbitrarily compare 1440p for next gen systems to 720p for current gen.  720p is a blurry image by modern standards which hides lots of details like textures and DOF, making a move to higher resolutions a necessity to actually explpoit the hardwares potential.  Its not adequet  for most people's gaming set ups unless they have a small 27" TV and sit quite far from their display. Even content on youtube rarely sits at 720p, 1080p is standard for what people experience and expect.

1440p with quality reconstruction is not a blurry image that hides lots of details, it is not below standards, infact it is an quality very few console gamers have ever experience. Its a brilliant quality, clear image which makes a notible improvement on 1080p and has delivered us some of (if not the) best looking games of the console generation (Uncharted 4, Death Stranding, God of War, Horizon, soon to be TLOU2 as well).  Even 1080p (reconstructed to 4k) next generation will be way more acceptable compared to 720p this generation, so I expect we will see it, especially in experimental ray tracing titles and in game settings where 60fps/RTX is seen as an option but not the default. There's an actual human experience behind these numbers which is why 30-60fps has been the standard for 30 years, the numbers aren't just going up for the sake of it. Developers are not going to mandate 1800p because its X % of 4k or X multiples of 1080p. They're going to look at the balance of visual characterics in their game and aim for a combination that achieves their vision and is most impressive for the end user, this is also why dynamic resolution and VRS will permeate next gen.

Again I would really love to see someone who has played a game like God of War at 1440p on a 50" 4k display complain that the image quality is bad & that gamers will not be happy with it over the coming years.

1: Until we know more about RDNA2 and Ampere, I'd rest that case. AMD could be closing the gap with a strong leap, Ampere not turn out as great as expected, and so on...

2. Nvidia's 20 series will be 2 years old when next-gen consoles launch. There is a good chance that AMD's RDNA 2 ray tracing will be more efficient than Nvidia's 20 series raytracing, even if it is less efficient than Nvidia's upcoming 30 series. And like I said before, developers may make ray tracing an optional feature in many next-gen games, giving gamers a choice between ray tracing and higher resolution and/or framerate. 

3. PC games don't receive the same level of optimization that console games do, and console hardware has less OS overhead than PC's. So comparing Control on PC to next-gen console games and saying that you won't see a graphical improvement if they aim for native 4K is a bad comparison.  

You seem to be forgetting some things:

1. Control is a game that was designed to scale on everything from a 1.3 tflop GPU Jaguar CPU base Xbox One to PC's with 12 tflop 2080ti GPU's and Core i9 CPU's. As a late gen game it had to be designed to run on a huge scale of hardware, and that means that visual compromises had to be made on both ends of the scale to get it to run on everything. If Control was designed as a PC exclusive, with minimum specs at 4 tflop and recommended specs at 10 tflop for instance, you would have a much better looking game. 

2. Nvidia's 20 series will be 2 years old when next-gen consoles launch. There is a good chance that AMD's RDNA 2 ray tracing will be more efficient than Nvidia's 20 series raytracing, even if it is less efficient than Nvidia's upcoming 30 series. And like I said before, developers may make ray tracing an optional feature in many next-gen games, giving gamers a choice between ray tracing and higher resolution and/or framerate. 

3. PC games don't receive the same level of optimization that console games do, and console hardware has less OS overhead than PC's. So comparing Control on PC to next-gen console games and saying that you won't see a graphical improvement if they aim for native 4K is a bad comparison.  

What does all of that mean? Well, for one thing, the minimum spec for next gen will increase by over 4x compared to last gen, from 1.3 tflop GCN to 4 tflop RDNA 2 (equivalent to 6 tflop GCN at least, possibly more, especially if MS decides to overclock XSS some before release). Assuming the same resolution as last gen, 900p for XB1 compared to 900p for XSS, that extra 4x power can be fully utilized to push graphics forward with ray tracing and other improvements. Then those graphical improvements from the 4x spec improvement on the low end can be ported over to the two higher end consoles, PS5 and XSX, and resolution scaled up as high as it can go without compromising framerate, using variable resolution tech to lower resolution in demanding scenes and increase it in less demanding scenes.

Now will devs actually aim for 900p on XSS so that the full 4x spec improvement can be put toward graphical improvements? Some probably will, while others will follow Microsoft's target and aim for 1080p. I'll be very surprised if we see more than a handful of games that run at less than 900p on XSS, sames goes for 1800p on XSX. PS5, well hard to say without knowing more about it's specs, if it is actually 9.2 tflop with Sony attempting to overclock it to 10 tflop as rumored, I would say that we'll see 1440p as the minimum for PS5. And yes, I agree with you that any PS5 and XSX games that are less than native 4K will likely use methods like checkerboarding and temporal injection to improve their upscaling to 4K. 

1. Perhaps, but I don't think gamers will be any more forgiving of $600 now than they were 14 years ago. Gamers are an entitled bunch, just look how much they rage when a publisher suggests increasing the price of games from $60, where it has been at for 15+ years, even though every other product has seen inflation based price increases in that time span.

2. I doubt it. Phil has said in interviews that Microsoft understands what gamers consider to be a reasonable price for hardware. I can't see him going for $600, that is definitely over gamer expectations. 

3. I'm pretty sure they have higher expectations for Series X than you think. Sales expectations were low for Xbox One X because it was a mid-gen refresh, MS knew that selling people a $500 system 3 years before next gen starts is a tougher prospect than selling them a $500 console at the start of a new gen. Yes, sales expectations will be higher for Series S than Series X, but they likely want to sell at least 25m Series X consoles this gen imo, not 5m or so like Xbox One X.

4. I actually agree with you that they need a disc drive S model for slightly more than the discless model. That might be the model I buy if they release it. I'm just not sure that it is happening, every leak so far has mentioned S being discless, none of them have mentioned the possibility of a slightly more expensive disc drive S model. It's also harder to sell people on a 4 tflop console for $350 when PS5 is expected to be about 10 tflop for $450, only $100 more for 6 more tflops of graphical power. They could go for an unusual price like $320 or $330 for the disc drive model, but console pricing almost always comes in increments of $50. 

5. The $460-510 estimated cost to build for Series X comes from Industry Analyst Daniel Ahmad (ZhugeEX), based on the rumored specs for Xbox Series X, compared to the rumored specs for PS5, which was recently leaked to have a $450 cost to build. If he is right, I definitely expect MS to sell Series X for $500. 

Just because a game is 1440P, doesn't mean everything in said game is rendered at 1440P.

There will definitely be a sizable uptick in performance either way thanks to the increased transistor budget allowing nVidia some movement on that front and to account for any stuff ups.

There is a chance that AMD's RDNA 2 will be less efficient too and less capable on the Ray Tracing front, lets not count our eggs in a row just yet... nVidia has had the technology edge for years now.

Do consoles receive extra optimization? Sure.
But they aren't receiving a level of optimization that has made the Radeon 7850 unable to play console games with Playstation 4/Xbox One levels of visuals for the most part.

And OS overhead is actually *less* on PC. Windows 10 doesn't need 2x CPU cores and 3GB of Ram on a PC.

Image quality is way more than resolution. Even HDR is just marketing, because contrast looks better on my projector than on my 4K HDR Panasonic. In fact everyone that comes is way more impressed with image size and how natural and realistic it looks, no one has praised my 4K TV, its barely better than a good 1080p TV, has no wow factor.

If you want quality then get good quality equipment and great speakers. a 4K HDR cheap Chinese brand will look miles worse than a top of the range 1080p TV.

You seem to be forgetting some things:

1. Control is a game that was designed to scale on everything from a 1.3 tflop GPU Jaguar CPU base Xbox One to PC's with 12 tflop 2080ti GPU's and Core i9 CPU's. As a late gen game it had to be designed to run on a huge scale of hardware, and that means that visual compromises had to be made on both ends of the scale to get it to run on everything. If Control was designed as a PC exclusive, with minimum specs at 4 tflop and recommended specs at 10 tflop for instance, you would have a much better looking game. 

I agree with most of what you said or don't have real disagreements, but this I will respond to.

It's hard to say what Control would be if it was designed solely for PCs (not base consoles as well). Because there would be graphics settings to adjust and ray tracing is optional. Generally PC games are already designed to work on various levels of specs so more people can play them.

What does minimum 4tflop mean really? Does that mean to run the game at lowest settings, 720p and 30 fps you need 4tflops? Even then, settings could likely be tweaked further for a playable experience on lower specs. In theory Control could function on Switch with a serious visual overhaul but could fundamentally be the same game.

We could say numerous 8th gen era games were designed for X1 as a minimum. Such as Witcher 3, because I don't think they anticipated scaling it back for Switch.

Crysis 2 and 3 on PC require specs far better than 7th gen consoles. You can't even lower the graphics settings to console levels in the PC versions. Yet the scaled back versions designed for consoles are essentially the same games.

Like I've said before, its evidently easier to lower the GPU demands of games over really high CPU and RAM requirements. Even if a game is designed for a powerful graphics card in mind, lower spec console can generally handle the same game with scaled back visuals.