I thought that maybe I was making a mistake by buying my SO a 570 4GB back in March, since I knew that other cards were around the corner. I don't have that concern anymore. At $130, that card is still approximately 15% better performance per dollar. And since this was mainly a Civ 6 build for her, it doesn't bother me that the Polaris cards will probably be missing out on extra optimizations in the future. I was really expecting AMD to put out something with a bit more of a competitive advantage, such as the 5700 XT vs 2060 Super or 2070 Super situation. The fact that they can only approximate Nvidia's card in the bunch is a bit sad. I know that AMD forced Nvidia to put out the 1650 Super and eat their own 1660 lunch, but still. AMD was supposed to be the king at this price range.
The only saving grace is that the Navi 14 chip is, for the first time, letting AMD put out some competitive laptop designs. I can see this chip slotting in where the old laptop king, the 1050 Ti, did. AMD may get a share of the market in the desktop space by providing a comparable product to Nvidia, and be able to enter a market where they've been honestly as good as nonexistent for 5+ years. Unfortunately, this is not a good sign for the new consoles. The Xbox One X has a GPU component that can be broadly compared to an RX 580, which has 5700 million transistors. This chip has 6400 million transistors and isn't performing any better. All the improvement has been on power efficiency and fabrication node cost savings, and those cost savings are suspect with 7 nm being so popular, and with the increase in video RAM adding to the overall cost of the console as well.
We may be looking at a chip that will be broadly comparable to the cheaper Xbox Scarlett option. If that's true, then targeting 1080p on that console instead of 4k could lead to a 3-4x relative increase in graphics performance, but where does that leave the top Scarlett option? AMD doesn't have a 4x faster chip. So they could instead use a cut down or even smaller version of this chip and target 2x performance increase over the Xbox One S at 1080p, but then they would be forced to put the full Navi 10, or something similar, in a console to equal the same performance at 4k. Which means those consoles are going to be very expensive (let's not forget they're supposed to have raytracing silicon too), or AMD is going to take one hell of a haircut on the sales of the chips.
This is all pretty far out speculation, but I think my main point stands. The fact that AMD didn't increase performance per transistor at the lower end means that they're going to have to offer bigger chips for the consoles. And that means that without Navi 2 pulling a rabbit out the hat, these new consoles aren't going to provide any better results than last time, when the PS4 and Xbox One ended up being about as powerful as a budget graphics card.
