But wouldn’t said data throughout matter in that context as well? Culling those polygons efficiently and moving more data/textures as the player moves through the world to maintain performance and speed not just for the current frame, but the frames to follow would be incredibly important would it not? It’s one thing to say the XSX can fill the screen a few times with high polys/textures but it’s maintaining that high throughout to move through a world with no loading that becomes even more important.
Any bottlenecks that arise from any link in the chain—CPU, GPU, RAM, and SSD will eventually rear their head with all these polys/textures being pushed. And not only having the ability to push more data through the that pipeline as well as cull the unneeded data faster, should increase the detail and performance that much more because less data has to sit in the RAM to account for where the player could potential go. The faster it can draw textures/polys, the less RAM is wasted on the potential places a player goes in the environment. It goes back to closing that gap from having the next possible 30 seconds to 1 minute in RAM to only having 1-2 seconds in RAM, thereby utilizing all that data for what’s ACTUALLY in front of the player instead of what he COULD see.
Having more CUs and more TFs begins to have diminishing returns once you hit certain resolutions in a higher poly/data scenario when you don’t have the means to keep the data flowing as efficiently both ways. And as far as custom, do you mean standard RDNA 2? Because that’s basically what Microsoft is saying. They have a few customizations, but it doesn’t seem that much attention was devoted to limiting bottlenecks and pushing data throughput. The speeds they’re pushing are from mid-level Gen 3 SSD, that was essentially purchased off the shelf.. vs a completely customized SSD controller and culling features that basic RDNA 2 doesn’t have. Their goal was largely to kill 2 birds with one stone—a decent PC-like console to help development with PC market, while also creating a cloud-based server architecture to help their cloud-services. It’s rarely true (if ever) that trying to do two things well beats a system that is focused on doing one thing great.
As this generation progresses and new engines are created, how a system be it a PC, XSX, or PS5 uses data will be the largest factor for performance and detail. And I would argue PS5 has the advantage there from just a sheer data throughout number, without even factoring in all the other customizations they have.