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I agree with your overall synopsis of the status quo. We might however see gaming shift more to multi-core workloads as the next gen of consoles are highly like

I agree with your overall synopsis of the status quo. We might however see gaming shift more to multi-core workloads as the next gen of consoles are highly likely to contain 8 core (16T) AMD CPUs based on Zen2 (and a lot of games are made for the lowest common denominator). This shouldn't be confused with the 8 core APUs found in current gen. Next gen will have an 8 core CPU and a NAVI 12+ GPU.

undersuit 7y ago
LinusTechTips made a video recently where they took an Intel Skulltrail, which is an enthusiast dual-socket Core 2 Quad platform from 2008(!), through a modern OS and game test. They platform was struggling until the enabled the Vulkan API in games. We have consoles to thank for that, without the low speed, high core count CPUs of the PS4 and Xbox One there'd be little justification for optimizing games for Vulkan and DX12
paulmd 7y ago
To be clear it's a shift from 8C8T to 8C16T (8C with SMT). The main change here is a massive (~3x) improvement in per-core performance. It's not actually a shift to (significantly) more threading but actually a shift to more per-core performance, like desktop PCs currently use. Consoles are getting desktop-like processors for the first time. This is creating quite a bit of anxiety in the desktop gaming community since high framerates depend on desktop processors being able to significantly outperform consoles on a per-core basis, and that will no longer be the case.