I am guilty of not reading the whole article but this part made me read the sentence twice because I could not believe it the first time. Like... what. Better? According to what metric?
The metric is platform-warring bullshit, pulled from thin air.
Intel and NVIDIA hardware is more efficient than AMD's. NVIDIA have been beating AMD on GPU efficiency for a
long time now, and this is unlikely to change when Navi is still GCN-based. NVIDIA have been ahead of AMD on efficiency even when being behind on the process node.
There's so much misinformation going around based on the Wired article that it's very frustrating if you're even slightly informed about this sort of PC-based hardware.
That's not to say these next-gen systems aren't going to be good - they will be a huge upgrade over current hardware and have me a little concerned as a PC gamer because devs are going to start targeting 30 FPS on that level of hardware.
But they're still going to be power-constrained devices built for a ~$500 price point - and AMD is likely the best choice for that kind of system. An Intel/NVIDIA box would either be more expensive or less powerful at the same price; but it would almost certainly be more efficient.
We don't even know if AMD have specific hardware for ray tracing in Navi.
I think it's likely, but that's pure speculation at this point. To say that they not only have RT hardware, but that it's more efficient than NVIDIA's RT Cores is a complete fabrication.
For all we know, it could be a compute-based solution. There was a GDC presentation about Ray-Traced Irradiance Fields this year, which demonstrated a solution that can scale down to running on Xbox One hardware:
https://www.gdcvault.com/play/1026182/
