AMD Compute vs Synthetic vs Gaming

[Poik]

I'm probably not stating this properly, but I hope you understand what I'm trying to get at.
Why is AMD's performance across these different things so inconsistent? Is it hardware limitations? Driver support? The software itself not being consistently AMD optimized? Something else?

 

[Cyberbeing]

In simplest terms, AMD and ATI before them have a habit of building GPUs which are specialized for workloads which don't always match up with workloads produced by real-world gaming.

During ATI's time, they focused on theoretical shader performance, while NVIDIA was building GPUs which were a bit more balanced in regards to geometry and pixel performance. This was also the era you'd have shader heavy games which heavily favored ATI/AMD and geometry heavy games which favored NVIDIA, while games which favored neither shaders nor geometry often performed better on NVIDIA.

A major factor was ATI/AMD GPUs being held back by CPU bottlenecks in their DX11 drivers, which has only recently begun to become a bit less of an issue as decent DX12/Vulcan implementations are becoming more widespread which allow them to get much closer to theoretical performance levels.

During AMD's time, they began focusing heavily on theoretical compute performance in their gaming GPUs, while NVIDIA switched gears and began stripping compute capabilities in order to create efficient GPU architectures optimized for gaming. Needless to say, AMD suffered for this.

In summary, rather than inconsistent, AMD GPUs often end up with niche specialties, since their speculation for the future of gaming when creating new architectures often doesn't pan out as they expected. Unlike NVIDIA, they rarely play it safe and create GPUs optimized for the present, and instead push the envelope without proper follow through in terms of developer support.

Yet with NVIDIA now taking risk by creating massive GPUs to add ray tracing and tensor cores in their gaming lineup, AMD now has the opportunity to shake things up with their next architecture.