This WASN'T a launch, it never was, EVERY single generation of gpu's AMD and Nvidia hold these MEDIA and industry events which let people know the direction they are going and what is going on for the tech.
They didn't give away performance not because it's bad but because it isn't and never was a launch. A bunch of people incorrectly thought it was a launch then think something went weird or AMD did a bad presentation. This wasn't for you, this is for reporters, media and dev's(generally smaller ones, bigger ones are well in on this stuff years in advance).
This is how these events go, it wasn't out of the ordinary, Nvidia does the same thing, as do Intel. Why did the AMD guy only expect 5k people watching, because it's a media thing and the stream was for media who couldn't afford to get out to Hawaii for events like these.
THe first thing like this I went to was now, over a decade ago, x800xt maybe, small media event in London, hotel, telling us details, letting us see the card, ask a few questions. Talking about dx/opengl/what new things it can do. There were ZERO numbers, no benchmarks, not even any running demos or machines.
The only people who were disappointed were those who hyped up the event in their own minds into something it wasn't.
Anandtech will do a review with benchmarks, every image that shows how some new tech works and has the tech summed up for non tech people to understand.... ALL that information comes from a day like AMD did yesterday for media. They do this for the media, then the media condenses it, gets cards to test and puts it together for a review when the launch happens.
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