jdwii :
So in 2020 you think 1080P gaming will still be mainstream instead of 4K growing or what about Ray-tracing? Na as it stands even a 295X can hardly do 4K 60FPS(but what about 120FPS) and nothing is good enough for Ray-tracing.
no one really publicly talks about that far ahead except for manufacturing and mfg. tools people. long term roadmaps are usually kept internal and only partial ones published every now and then.
right now, 1080p pc gaming (especially desktop) could easily be entry level if a few factors weren't against us consumers. one of them is the ongoing display price fixing. another one is the slow moving display standards war. you'll notice that in mobile devices this is much less of an issue. 4k is making fast headway but it'll still be stymied by panel pricing and standards for a while.
i think current gpus are bound by manufacturing process and memory bottleneck. if those two open up, gfx performance increase will ramp up again. we're in the middle of a transition from usual low-res gaming (1080p and lower) to high res.(4k and upwards), multimonitor, and headmounted vr gaming. current crop of gaming gpus will not be useful when the transition ends or stabilizes.
as for ray tracing. i don't really know. i read about other technologies like global illumination gaining favor among gpu makers. some of the articles i read say that ray tracing is very dificult to implement in real time with current technology. high performance gpus may take a temporary back seat in favor of mobile. from the upcoming gpus it seemed to me that both amd and nvidia are just slapping on more vram, wider bus and better power management instead of gunning for performance. hawaii was a happy, surprise exception. hawaii type gpus may not come out until tsmc has fully worked out their 20nm process.