I've heard a couple of people mentioning in this thread and also a few others that "If AMD have RTX..." or "AMD doesn't have RTX.."
RDNA2 cards are confirmed to have Ray Tracing. The consoles also have Ray Tracing, which we've actually seen in some PS5 games.
"RTX" is just a clever Nvidia marketing term for their Ray Tracing solution. The actual code that implements the Ray Tracing is a part of the Direct X 12 API, which if you are not aware is cross vendor.
Meaning that any game that currently supports Ray Tracing on Nvidia cards should seemlessly support it on RDNA2 AMD cards with zero work from the developers. Now some might be tested and optimized towards Nvidia cards due to only their cards supporting Ray Tracing up to now, but in 99% of cases developers should have to do zero work for RTX to be supported on RDNA2 cards.
The reason I bring this all up is just to clarify something that I see repeated again and again in these threads on GAF so I figured I would set the record straight.
So hopefully that has cleared this up once and for all, I mean you would have to be paying literally 0% attention to things to still think this at this point, hell you would need to be willfully ignorant as it has been known for easily more than a year that these cards would support Ray Tracing, and there have been tons of tech discussions on the consoles and their Ray Tracing, which are....you guessed it RDNA2 based cards (with customisations).
As for DLSS, it seems like quite cool tech, although somehwat overhyped in some tech press circles, I guess that is what promotional deals and Nvidia marketing money can do. Having said that, it does seem like actually good tech and will likely continue to improve, however currently it has to be implemented by the developers on a game by game basis and so far is only supported in something like 6 games. I wouldn't base a purchase entirely on something like that while ignoring all of the other features/metrics for comparison between the cards.
Do AMD have anything to compete with DLSS? Honestly I've no idea, they haven't mentioned anything about it and have been incredibly tight lipped on the features/software stack of these new cards. They might end up surprising people as there are some rumours from some tech youtubers that they might have something cooking on this front. As a hypothetical, what if AMD had some kind of upscaling tech that was say 80-90% as good as DLSS2.0 but that worked automatically at the driver level (with an on/off toggle in the software) on every game with no work from developers? Would that constitute "competing" with Nvidia in this arena? Would it be considered a win over Nvidia if the quality was only slightly worse than DLSS but worked in every game off the bat?
I have no idea if AMD have something like this, just a random hypothetical but it is a question worth considering for the DLSS advocates.