The story goes that Nvidia couldnt get the wafer count they wanted at the price they wanted from TSMC, both because TSMC has no real competition and because AMD has been vacuuming up 7nm orders for some time now. So Nvidia put out claims that they wre also looking at samsung's 8nm node, because it offered "comparable" performance for a much lower price, in an attempt to get lower pricing from TSMC.
TSMC called Nvidia's bluff.
Now Nvidia is stuck making gargantuan dies on this garbage node. Of course 8nm isnt actually a BAD node per say, at sub 1900 mhz it's quite efficient, but its die fault rate is just high enough to make a big die like GA102 very expensive/hard to make, and the push to get ampere to clock as high as possible is obliterating power usage. Part of this may be due to optimization, samsung and TSMC's nodes are not identical, and the decision to go with samsung came too late in ampere's life to optimize the arch for the node, so if nvidia sticks with it for a second generation (say a delay in 5nm) we could see a fermi 2.0 style optimization. But for now they have left themselves open for a serious licking.
RT is still a meme for the most part, even with ampere the performance hit is not worth it for most consumers, and that is on 3080/3090 cards. Most of the market is 3050/3060 level, and those eventual cards wont be able to RT worth a damn. It will likely only be used sparingly with this generation of consoles due to the huge performance hit, and AMD decided to chase rasterization to corner nvidia in outright performance with cheaper dies. We can see the results here, with the possibility that a 500mm die with a 256 bit DDR6 bus beating a 700mm die with a 320 bit GDDR6X bus.
Radeon VII was a complete fucking joke. It was an AI card repurposed for gaming, it's drivers were trash, and to this day remain trash. Instinct was never meant to be a radeon card. Vega 64 was a decent idea, but it focused too much on things like FP32 that dont help games, much like VIII vega 64 was much better as a rendering/computational card. AMD has had this issue for awhile. GCN as an arch isnt bad but the lack of specialization for different tasks leaves it an inefficient mess. AMD certainly didnt have the money to revamp it, and Raja was a total idiot for pursuing a 3DFX strategy with Vega instead of just making a bigger polaris in the first place. The RTG group in the last few years has doen some major optimization to vega for the APUs, and if vega 64 had the 2019 optimizations in 2016 instead of just being repurposed it would have been a legitimate 1080ti competitor.
The other thing is that rDNA could have easily been a 2080ti competitor. the 5700xt at stock power settings only sits around 225-240 for a 40CU card, and it is squarely between the 2070 super and 2070. They could have done a 56-60 CU card with a 12GB 384 bit bus for bandwidth and gotten the 50% more hardware needed to hit the 2080ti. AMD just....didnt bother to do it. For some reason. So it's not so much that AMD is suddenly improving, they WERE sandbagging with the RX 5000 series, and with rDNA 2 were just getting the core counts they should have had last year.
