You are weirdly comparing a 4 year old software API that wasn't even stable by the time the consoles launched verse an 8year old APU hardware design.
Are you trying to pretend that the PS5 SoC was already designed 8 years ago. That is complete nonsense.
And yes, it's DX12_2 that is setting the standard for modern GPUs. Be it from AMD, Intel or Nvidia.
None of that means anything other, Nvidia controls DirectX as the primary author that rewrote what is the modern day DirectX for Microsoft with the OG Xbox.
Neither Nvidia nor AMD control the DirectX standard.
It's controlled by Microsoft and they always consult the main graphics vendors, when defining the next version.
Both AMD/ATI, Nvidia, Intel and other companies have contributed to defining DirectX features, across several iterations.
primitive shaders are actually more versatile than Mesh shaders which is just a software wrapper over that hardware feature. Same with RT in the PS5 is more versatile than the RT in DirectX - which has needed multiple revisions on efficiency because the software API as it was didn't traverse efficiently.
The software wrapper to provide Variable Rate shading in DirectX was also way behind the software solution in CoD being done on the PS5 Geometry engine, that was again more versatile than a software wrapper.
Mesh Shaders replace more of the traditional geometry pipeline, than primitive shaders. And give more control to developers on how it works. This is why is was chosen as the standard for both DirectX and Vulkan.
Yes, the RT API is more efficient than the DXR API, but it does not change that RT was started by Nvidia and it became the standard for DirectX 12_2
It was not Sony, nor AMD that started implementing ray-tracing in APIs, games or hardware.
The VRS standard implemented by Nvidia in Turing calls for a hardware solution. Something that Nvidia had since Turing and AMD since RDNA2.
The PS5 does not have hardware VRS. Not you can say all you want about how good the software VRS is on CoD, but that is not the standard that is used by all current GPUs, be it from AMD, Intel or Nvidia.
And once again, it came from Nvidia. Not from AMD and not from Sony. And it's a feature missing on the PS5, but it's likely to be on the Pro.
PS5 uses a mix of features that transcend all of RDNA1-3 as shown by the ML AI solution in Ragnarok and the ability of the PS5 GPU to do RT and texturing simultaneously without blocking.
The Ai solution on Ragnarock uses normal FP16 calculations, without any ML acceleration. It just runs on shader code.
It's good that Sony managed to get something like that from a software based solution. But it's nothing comparable to DP4A, and much less to WMMA or Tensor Cores.
The Pro is the first Sony console to have dedicated hardware to accelerate Tensor operations. And this came from a response to Nvidia.
The reality is that Nvidia was the first to have an AI upscaler, and when everyone else noticed how good it was, that is when the rush to catch up started.
So now we have similar solutions from Intel, Sony, Qualcomm, AMD, Apple, etc.
As for Nanite, your whole strawman of DirectX doesn't change the reality that the PS5 geometry engine is more versatile and runs nanite more efficiently than either RDNA2 or Turing despite it being twice the hardware age of either.
Nanite supports both primitive and mesh shaders. And the default rendering method is using mesh shaders, as it delivers the best performance.
Only when a GPU does not support mesh shaders, such as AMD's RX5000 series or the PS5, does nanite fallback to primitive shaders.
No, I'm saying the PS5 prototype was ready 8years ago, not the start of the R&D that will have began at the finalisation of the PS4 Pro
Primitive shaders were already done a decade earlier on the PS2 with SotC, and done again on the SPUs
Yes, older consoles used a geometry pipeline that resembles modern primitive shaders.
But modern primitive and mesh shaders are a form of compute for geometry.
The PS3 didn't even have support for programable shaders.
The tensor cores weren't even out when the PS5 APU prototype was finished.
Nvidia started development of Tensor Cores right after they snatched the developers that were working at Intel, for the Larrabee project.
We are talking about 2009-2010 period, for Nvidia to start working on this feature. And it paid off, as they are now the market leader in AI, by a gigantic margin.
The PS5 APU was probably ready in early 2020. And the SoC for the Series S/X, a bit later.
Nvidia's first Tensor Core was released in 2017, with Volta.