If DLSS was a sham the various PC hardware and game review sites would be in disagreement over the validity of the feature.
That is simply not the case in 2021. DLSS 2.0 is universally regarded as a functional technology. The DLSS 1.0 doubters have all shelved their objections.
Reputable review sites such as Tom's Hardware, The FPS Review, PC Gamer have all done detailed analyses of various games with DLSS off, Ray Tracing (RT) on/DLSS off, and RT on/DLSS on. In every review, DLSS has been shown to help with framerates markedly without a large dropoff in image quality.
Remember that DLSS 2.0 comes in three modes: Quality (maximum image quality improvement, lowest framerate increase), Balanced, and Performance (lowest image quality improvement, maximum framerate performance). What you do with DLSS is up to you to decide just like pretty much any other graphics feature (shadow quality, model quality, texture quality, et cetera ad nauseam).
If DLSS was an obvious farce AMD would not be putting so much effort into developing FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR) whose release has been pushed back to "later 2021" (which to me sounds like November). They would have already released some retarded sharpening code called FSR and called it a day.
Note that analyzing one still frame capture with DLSS 2.0 on and DLSS off isn't particularly relevant. You're playing games at 60, 120, 165 fps (or more) and you won't be able to detect slight artifacting along one line in one corner of one image. Your eyes WILL notice a 15 fps increase in performance.
We have yet to see if AMD can nail FSR on the first try. I have my own prediction about that which I will keep private for now.
As for your ability to recognize quality ray tracing, I have to shrug my shoulders. Ray tracing is not new technology. There are clear examples going back to the Eighties. It was all pre-rendered back then, no real time stuff until the emergence of powerful 3D workstations from SGI and others in the Nineties.
Clearly, you have not played a quality game like
Control with RT on/DLSS on. That is a marvelous example of ray tracing since the environment is full of glass surfaces, wet floors, etc. If some other games that have ray-tracing don't show that image quality difference, that simply shows that some developers really need to spend a little more time at polishing their craft. The troubled
Cyberpunk 2077 is pretty much universally applauded for the effectiveness of its use of ray-tracing on PC.
Again if RT was fraudulent, AMD would not have dedicated so much real estate on their die for a bunch of RT cores. If rasterization was the only valid 3D graphics computational workload then they would have gone whole hog that way.
Tom's Hardware is a little more complimentary of the 6700 XT than RPS:
Navi 22 joins the GPU party, trimming core counts, die size, and price
www.tomshardware.com
but still says the 3060 Ti is a better deal
"If all of the Nvidia Ampere and AMD RDNA2 GPUs were available at prices close to MSRP, the RX 6700 XT would look a bit overpriced. It's basically a match for the RTX 3060 Ti, without the option for DLSS and weaker ray tracing performance, at an $80 price premium. Calling this an RTX 3070 competitor is a bit too ambitious, unless you limit testing to AMD-promoted games like Assassin's Creed Valhalla, Borderlands 3, Dirt 5, etc. "
Either you compare street prices across the board or compare MSRPs across the board. You can't mix-and-match to justify whatever point you're trying to prove.
Remember that eventually pricing will fall back to MSRP. Maybe not in 2021 but likely sometime in 2022. There are still ways to score a Big Navi or Ampere card right now at or near MSRP but it takes a little luck.
Based on AMD's own actions clearly they think that ray tracing and machine-learning super sampling image improvement technology (FSR for them) are worth baking into their silicon.
That's something no one can deny.
