I for one am sceptical. Like, really, rreally sceptical. - a 9,75TF 5700XT already heats more than a 2080Ti and draws as much power as a 1080Ti/2080. so how on earth they want to put a 12TF GPU into a tiny plastic box and cool it without jet engine sounds like the PS4/Pro did? And that's just the CUs alone, without counting RT cores. And they are already on 7nm compared to NV, it's not like they can shrink the whole thing any more.
Sure, throwing numbers on the internet is easy, even a 5yo kids with a tablet can do it, but let's put all the childish hype away for at least split of a second and go back to planet Earth - 12TF means something like 56CUs @1,7GHz - that's 40% bigger GPU than 5700xT that already reaches 90 Celsius degrees... Plus the RT cores, don't forget the RT cores, they take up about 20% space of each SM in Turing GPUs, that's A LOT, and I don't think AMD's very first take on the matter will be significantly better, if any.
My guess is, the dev kits are still based on the GCN , or rather some early GCN/Navi hybrid architecture as it was rumored like a year or two ago, so the devs can figure out the final performance levels of the consoles, how far they can push the games and what's not, while the final products will be indeed fully based on RDNA1/2 which is already about 40% more efficient in gaming tasks vs GCN, so lesser CUs, (therefore lesser die space and heat) would be needed to achieve the same performance, with actually lower TFlops. You know, just like NV already does for the past decade or so. So something like 7-8TF vs 10-12. OR - everything is build on Infinity Fabric, and there are actually 2-4 smaller GPUs that act like one big. But to be honest I don't think AMD is capable of doing so, when even Intel and NV with their absurd R&D budgets and know-how can't figure out MCM either.
The memory is kind of a let down if true, 32GB were always a wet boys dreams in my books whenever someone mentioned it, but 24GB seemed just about right, while 16 means just 4 more GB than X1X. The good thing is OS won't take up more RAM than it already does on current consoles, which is kind of strange, because X1X was indeed about to reserve 4GB for the OS for native 4K UI, but they ditched the idea and went with upscalled 1080p UI instead due to devs suggestions. So it's either 1080p UI again or the new Windows Core OS is more optimized. But for those 13GB left, the data would be backed up by the new SSDs, so streaming on the go instead of permanently storing the data in RAM shouldn't be much of an bottleneck. Or maybe even the next-gen consoles will utilize HBCC technology, who knows?
As far as MS console goes I think it will be hard to really judge the hardware's capabilities based only on pure paper specs, bare in mind they did some heavy customization with the Jaguar CPU in the X1X, some sort of HW build-in DX12 instructions, which did actually allow to overcome it's natural limits and allowed for 60FPS gameplay in games like Forza Horizon and Gears 5 recently as compared to the base model. So if they put this sort of customization into all aspects of the next XB, which will be already based on quite capable AMD architectures, I don't think the ordinary TF, GB and GHz will do the justice.
And again, the RT - this will be a real game-changer, and whoever "masters" it the best will have a huge advantage as more CUs will be freed up from some heavy-ass tasks - remember The Division's HFTS? This shadow technology had a huuuge impact on the overall performance, the FPS literally tanked, and now the newest CoD:MW does exactly the same thing, except even better and without a single hit on the performance, a 2080TI can still run the game at 4K@60 or FHD@240, just like you would Imagine a 1200$ card should run games. So again, if it's really 10TF vs 12 or whatever on the Sony's side, BUT their console is more RT capable, I'd say the odds are even, to say the least. We all know Sony has some programming wizards on their side, and I'm more than sure they will use every available chunk of RT and use it to it's fullest, unimaginable potential.
