AMD wasn't aiming for the high end with RDNA 1. Its a stepping stone to RDNA 2. And RDNA 1 did meet the 50% Perf:Watt over Polaris.
RayTracing was always going to be with RDNA 2, as it was being implemented along with Sony and MS. RayTracing as it is now is basically a tech demo. The few people that have a 2080Ti can play games at 1080P and almost sustain 60fps. But it means basically nothing to everybody else. As for deep learning, meh. DLSS is basically an extremely complex way of doing up scaling. And compared to upscale+sharpen filter, in some very specific cases DLSS 2 looks a bit better, but in other places looks significantly worse. Especially when it involves text.
Navi 1x was also said to be debuted in early 2019. No place did AMD say it was going to be out two years ago.
There are several Navi 2x chips. One of them is a chip that is significantly larger than a 5700 XT that is expected to be a 3080Ti competitor.
There was definitely a delay in Navi's launch. If it was originally supposed to launch in H1 2018, it was pushed back to H2 2019. See picture below.
It's particularly interesting to hear Navi's story, was it originally intended for N14 node and then moved forward to N7, was simply too late.
So when people pop up saying "Oh AMD will move to 5nm next and get to market quicker"" etc etc I don't believe it. It hasn't happened for years. They don't have the experience or proven track record to execute quickly. But I wish they did.
I have serious doubts that Navi 2X is two times Navi. On the slide in question the X is capitalized where a times is usually lowercase. Additionally, considering that the current Navi is "Navi 10" and "Navi 14", which can be summarized as "Navi 1x", It’s really simple to assume that the next GPUs are "Navi 20" and "Navi 30", so the x stands for "any number", not "x-times improvement". 2X is the generational code name for all consumer-oriented non-semi custom RDNA 2 silicon, with each piece of silicon then having a distinct second digit. This is what it is about not a rumour of it
will be 2 times the performance. Note: Hopefully it comes out with 2x the performance but best not to board the hype train.
The performance/ watt has been a consistent marketing story but it still hasn't got them the high end. All I am saying is that I don't think they will get the high end this time around either.
As for DLSS 2.0, it works great with great FPS least in my experience. AMD needs something here and they don't have it.