Hello 3D_Scan_Fan,
When you say that the new mesh (from depth maps in version 1.6) reconstruction has less details than the dense cloud, what do you mean? You can run the Build Mesh operation in High/Ultra quality setting the polygon count to 1 billion, for example and then export the mesh as PLY and import it back as point cloud. Of course do not even try to open such "detailed" mesh in the Model view. Have you tried to make such test in Metashape 1.6 and what were the results?
Or maybe you can share some dataset where you get acceptable and desired results of the dense cloud generation, but the depth maps based mesh generation is inferior, as you say.
As for your comment regarding competitors, are you sure that RC uses GPU intensively for every processing stage? I've just reviewed some PugetSystem
benchmark (not of the actual application version, however) and do not see any considerable difference in processing time for most of the stages between GTX 1660 Ti and RTX TITAN X, for example. Which makes me think that GPU is not used on every stage.
And can you please confirm that RC generates the actual dense cloud or allows to export the mesh vertices as a dense cloud?