basically saying that Navi 10/14 @ 2GHz is already very barely. It's highly possibly the limit of Navi. Which means that 2.23GHz is highly likely to be beyond the sweet spot of Navi's I/V curve. So throttling is a must. Of course that's why sony implemented variable frequency.
So about variable frequency, why would it be affecting game developing so much?
Because the shared power budget often prefers GPU instead of CPU. And Sony didn't give devs the ability to control the power balance.
So, imagine you're playing a game which is both CPU and GPU hungry.
At first, the CPU might be operating at 45W 3.5GHz, and the game is smooth at the beginning, the CPU wants to draw more frames per second.
Then the GPU is in heavy duty to draw those frames, and it become a bottleneck soon. So the smart shift transfers the power balance to GPU more.
Meanwhile, the CPU is still calculating the next frame. Guess what? It become slower!
This might cause a serious variable frame time issue which is especially bad for 60hz screens.
That's where they need v sync.
So let's say we have a 16.66ms time budget for each frame. Now again, for each frame, the power needed and the power provided is out of sync. Why? Because the CPU is always calculating for the next frame, while the GPU is always calculating for the current frame. This is the parallel way to be widely used in game rendering to improve fps.
E.g. a frame needs cpu time for 16.66ms, and gpu time for 16.66ms. if it's done in serial way than it needs 33.33ms which makes a 30fps game. However if it's done in parallel way it takes only 1666+16 ms to render 100 frames, which means the game is 60fps.
So imagine a scene where the current frame requires GPU power and the next frame requires CPU power. How to distribute that power requirement? The smart shift is still very bottlenecking here and can cause a serious frame pacing issue again.
With dev's full control, they might be able to balance the power shift better when certain things happen, e.g. a smoke grenade usually destroys the performance, but they don't want the fps to be too variable, so they can limit the power balance.
Again, the variable frequency technology came out so many years ago and no game console ever used it in games, at least not without the game developers' full control. There's a reason to that.
