[zamalek]

The amount of float point arithmetic done on the CPU in modern games is less than you'd think. For graphics you are looking at no more than 1000s of matmuls on the CPU, 10 000s at worst. Games that do their physics on the CPU still struggle to saturate it even with SSE. In games a good amount of CPU time is spent moving bytes around, which is precisely why we have data oriented programming.

The reason the CPU bottlenecked pre-DX12/pre-Vulkan games is because a hefty amount of it was used for the abstraction: likely little of which was FLOPs. Basically: you forgot to profile first ;). For a purely graphics workload the CPU will be doing relatively small amounts of work.

In addition I can say with fair certainty that a smaller portion of the gamer market upgrades their CPU on a regular basis (so-called enthusiasts). Taking myself as an example: I haven't upgraded my CPU since 2010 and I've only started feeling that pinch this year. That's a lot of CPUs without AVX2 support.

TLDR; AVX2 is currently in the "solutions looking for a problem" bucket.