I am not sure where you are getting the "visual upgrade is small" when you have plenty of people including hardware unboxed themselves saying the visual upgrade is noticeable. If you think this is a small visual upgrade:

Then idk what to tell you other than to get your eyes checked. SSAA isn't even in the same league as to the type of visual upgrade that Ray Tracing offers even back then. Even if you have something like Ray Tracing reflections on and rest of the affects off, it offers a noticeable visual upgrade. And with DLSS which you keep ignoring, lessens the performance hit by quite a bit. The idea that very few games use RT and therefore it shouldn't matter is nonsense because not only will that number increase significantly now that the consoles have it but number of the major titles that released this holiday season have some form of Ray Tracing on both Console and PC.

The reason why people are "Using Raytracing right now as main value to define how good a GPU is" is because in Raster Performance, both Nvidia and AMD gpus are within single digit % of each other in majority of the games in which they trade blows. And when they are that close but then you have AMD gpus having a worse Ray Tracing implementation that even the 2000 series, it 110% matters a lot. Because when you are spending money on a GPU where the Raster performance is so close but AMD has potato RT performance, it would make sense for a lot of people to go with Nvidia and be on the cutting edge of technology. The Intel comparison that you made is nonsense.

PC is about options. If you want to not have options, play on a console... Consumers should be able to choose on which games they want to prioritize frame rate like Call of Duty or which games they want to prioritize Visuals like Minecraft RTX. It shouldn't be up to the reviewer to decide for them. Ray Tracing is a feature that is available now on a growing number of titles. It's an Option. And when people are spending $600+ on a GPU, they should have the Option to experience cutting edge visuals even if there's a performance hit.

The irony of using Intel in this comparison is that AMD's reliance on Raster is Similar to Intel's reliance on 14nm. They are both old technologies... The other funny part is that Intel is downplaying new technologies like AMD's Chiplet approach similar to how AMD is downplaying new technologies like Nvidia's Ray Tracing/DLSS.

If anything, AMD's GPU division is more like Intel than anyone else.

I mean, yes you are sacrificing draw distance and frame rate in Minecraft but the game in it's entirety looks completely different. It's looks like a generational leap in visuals if I have ever seen one while still being above 60fps if you have a GPU powerful enough.

But the key here isn't whether or not you or I agree with the visual advantages vs performance hit as everyone would have a different opinion. The key here is whether or not all the information is being presented to the consumer from the reviewer which Hardware Unboxed was not doing. Raster is no longer the only metric to measure in every game nor is it the only deciding factor for purchasing a GPU when the Raster performance is so close.

What are you talking about? While not up to par with Nvidia's Ampere, AMD has brought ray tracing hardware to its GPUs and it's keen to use it, while at the same time not compromising their raster performance. After all, both technologies will live together for a few more years, because RT won't become the norm until its implementation doesn't bring such a big performance loss, and for that to happen you need new and more powerful hardware. Judging AMD's stance on RT just on their first hardware itereation is, and I'm sorry to say this, short-sighted.

And regarding their stance on DLSS, well, maybe their decision to split their architectures and remove the GPGPU qualities of their gaming cards has come at the wrong time, and maybe they'll have to bring it back in the future to use that for their version of that tech. We don't know. What we know is that they're letting MSoft do the work with DirectML.

In any case, hardware architectures are designed many years in advance of the time the product finally reaches the market. Just because 5 years ago (to say some made-up date), AMD didn't took an upscaling tech into account when laying out their Navi products, that doesn't mean that they won't do it in future parts.