I think you only read the click bait titles rather the full comment from Richard 
I’d imagine COVID, and its impact on development teams, is a factor too. I wouldn’t worry, the ray-tracing is coming.
No, I think we should just wait and see. It’s frustrating that Xbox haven’t got everything ready for launch.
There was a leaked documentation for the June or July GDK release.
I don’t have it now but it was posted everywhere back then. That info was in the notes. There were quite a few areas that said api support would only come post launch and some related to performance too.
But it doesn’t seem too bad. Pretty much every game shown has been hitting perfect performance and reaching the resolution targets even in preview code months before launch.
The situation is undoubtedly much better than xbone launch where many games had trouble getting higher than 720p, not to mention the framerate issues across the board.
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Yeah, I think at most, some games will have RT a bit after launch and that’s basically it. And even then, RT won’t be mind-blowing at launch and no games will be taking full advantage of that. It is going to be there in very limited ways, like we have seen so far on all plateforms, tanking performance more than anything else. However, it will get better through optimization as time goes on like anything else.
Yeah, there’s plenty of optimizations to be researched.
ML based denoising is an immediate one (and Ms has researched a very good ML denoiser but only for Ao)
Then there’s resolution upscaling with ML too.
Optimizations on the RT itself. Decoupling from screen resolution and framerate, falling back to other solutions for distant surfaces etc.
And finally more exotic stuff, like both VRS and Sampler feedback can potentially help reducing the RT rendering costs.
Exactly, it is like the first steps of RT on PC with the Turing cards. Nothing impressive, bad performances unless you are willing to pay 1500 dollars. It is gonna be the same way for the next-gen consoles. It is the very first time we have dedicated HW RT on both consoles, and it is also a first for AMD. Nothing is gonna be amazing at first and you can see all the sacrifices that had to be made on Spider-man or Ratchet and Clank for example just to make it work. There is plenty of headroom for both consoles in terms of optimization.