Even though AMD did not show any ray tracing game benchmarks, it at least mentions a few metrics in a footnote from the RDNA 2 architecture overview. Team Red tested an unspecified RX 6000 model with the DXR SDK more than 2 months ago and the performance seems to be a bit higher than the RTX 2080 Ti, but still lagging by 33% when compared to the RTX 3080.
https://www.notebookcheck.net/AMD-sneaks-additional-details-on-the-expected-RX-6000-series-ray-tracing-performance-in-the-RDNA-2-overview.499940.0.html
Not only RT performance matter when you render RT scene. They can improve de-noiser via soft updates I think. And frames will be boosted by 2 digit %.
The lack of disclosure points to less performance than Nvidia. Still wont be a deal beaker if the cards are available, cost less and performance is close enough.
While I won't say that raytracing performance does not matter, in fact I would go so far as to say that raytracing is the future, we are not yet at a stage where worse RT performance is a dealbreaker. It has RT, and around 2080Ti level of RT performance means that RTed games are playable, and that's sufficient. I'm not going for peak performance with raytracing enabled.
Minor edits:
- if AMD said it would match or exceed 2080ti then it did live up to its claims.
- i think you meant, "mean feat" rather than "mere feat". Mean as in "average".