You're very confused here. Our discussion to date has been about non-emulated "BC" as used to play PS4 games on PS4 Pro, or Xbox One games on One X, when there's no official enhancements. This is nearly identical between the two, and no rendering is being "handicapped".
I'm saying Sony designing the Pro such that PS4 games that were not built to leverage it via enhancements were not utilizing the full processing power and that was not a good thing at all. They should not repeat that with PS5. Boost mode came months after launch after their competition already was talking up their superior approach publicly. X1X was not handicapped by gating GPU resources while doing BC emulation nor when running X1S games. Pro was. The former is the better approach. I doubt Sony designed the Pro around boost mode as a core feature but I'd imagine for PS5 that would be remedied and they'd give the emulated PS4 games the full suite of CU's available (not including RT hardware). That is what I presume and hope they do this time.
How does that follow? On the contrary, pushing CU count higher is necessary to match some "insider" claims (e.g. both very close, PS5 more powerful, etc).
I'm not saying it follows deductively, mind you, but here is my thinking atm. More CU's + separate RT hardware would probably push performance well beyond the 12 TF of the XSX I'd assume. Taking the RT load off of the nominal GPU resources seems like it'd be a sizeable boost a ways beyond ~3 TF worth of computing, no? Guess it depends on how much weight the RT hardware is pulling. I'm assuming it carries a lot of the load, while you might assume much less.
Yes, it does. We do not know who those sources are, what info they had access to or when, how specific or precise they were when conveying it, how accurately it was passed on, etc. It's a simple argument from authority: "[X] said it, and I trust them." As I noted, this is much less of an argument, from a warrant or logical viewpoint, than the one you dismiss as unworthy of the name.
Your 'argument' earlier was just pointing out a correlation from a presumed outcome and even that merely correlates to the existence of a boost mode, not extra CU's. Then you assumed that since last time they had excess CU's sitting idly by during BC mode then this time we should presume that also happens with PS5. My point there was that you aren't offering any reasoning to suggest that so it's a non-sequitur. I think many would agree their approach to Boost Mode was not ideal and giving emulated games full access to available CU's in PS5 would be better.
And yes, I gracefully admit my reasoning regarding XSX 12 TF is indeed an argument from authority, but so is anyone willing to accept Sony/MS's own specs. Obviously not all insiders are equally credible, but Brad Sams and Tom Warren (and Paul Thurrott if he decides to pass info along at some point) are legitimately the most intrinsically well connected in the biz in terms of high level sources imho. These aren't people talking to some buddy who happens to work in marketing, or some QA tester working on a first party game, or a Turn10 coffee boy, etc. Their sources clearly are much higher up the chain since they are able to get info WAY in advance about internal strategy initiatives that others would not be privy to downstream. These MS insiders independently confirmed their info with multiple other sources before putting it out there and DF then did the same thing with their own sources (presumably dev sources).
Yes, we have a couple bits of info on XSX in github but not a lot, hence my comment. Didn't mean to suggest it was not included in the leak, just meant there was a lot less info for it than for PS5 there. Lastly, I wanna remind you that what you take as fact in the end is also gonna be a 'argument from authority' as it will be based on what these companies claim and what DF tells you instead of any actual testing you personally do. Most of us aren't interested in deductive proofs here as computing power takes a back seat to what we can verify ourselves (the games playing on our TV) and that's what matters in the end of course.
The question to be addressed if: What probability do we think certain outcomes have?
Using arguments from authority, when these authorities have uniquely good track records, it promotes the likelihood that the outcomes they ascribe to MS is indeed what MS is planning. Granted, we dunno if they will hit their 12 TF target yet. On the PS5 side, seems to me we know it can do 9.2 TF if running at a really high clock and we know there is RT hardware to account for outside that setup. We can be certain, as you have argued successfully, that PS5 likely has a boost mode for PS4/Pro BC emulation. But I'm still not seeing where you jump from 'boost mode is present' to 'more CU's are present'. Sure, more CU's would help explain how PS5 can perform on par with a 12 TF XSX, but maybe the bespoke RT setup on PS5 can do that too without any extra CU's. I'd even argue there is more vague insider commentary correlating with the latter than the former, which you can discount and understandably so, but I'm not wanting to throw any insider info away at this point myself.
Even if I don't agree with your rationale as stated, the fact we can focus a bit of attention on CU's might be fruitful. Why wouldn't they want to let PS4 games tap into the full set of CU's for this 2 GHz BC boost mode? If there are 48 CU's there, why not use them? One possibility might be that your assumption about being able to gate CU's arbitrarily might not be true. Maybe CU count, or at least even multiples of CU count, is more important than we understand? Then you could have the 48 ya think are there but not the 54 needed for a full tripling of resources. Do we know *why* boost mode only gives access to 18 CU's in the Pro? There we had twice as much available, so one would think there was a reason this mode limited access to the other CU's that got turned off. Mybe their architecture has to have that kind of handicap for some highly technical reasons we dunno yet whereas MS's didn't last time. That would provide your non-sequitur rationale with something more tangible to work with and might push us up the range of CU options for PS5 to line up with insider info.
