Well, from the user perspective, chip size and clock are crucial factors, as GPU workloads tend to be parallelizable. Besides, chip size and clock don't come fo

Well, from the user perspective, chip size and clock are crucial factors, as GPU workloads tend to be parallelizable. Besides, chip size and clock don't come for free, so I think they shouldn't be discarded regardless. AFAIK, with each generation, Nvidia has increased raw performance by 20-30%, which is significant. On the other hand, the wall of physical limits is getting closer (which may restrict the chip size), but until then, GPUs are faring very well. GPUs functionalities also have a very different nature (as you point out), but this can play well for the user. Realism depends on many functionalities, which have plenty of headroom for improvement (in the sense of hardware support); see ray tracing, which supposedly, is going to be significantly faster on Ampere.