Oh man, those were cards I could only dream about back then. It's because they've been so good in the past and utterly smashed Nvidia that I hold out hope they'll do it again for a generation or two. The 9070xt gives me hope that they'll do a top tier card next time, couldn't believe they didn't try once they saw the uptake on the 9070xt.
But that harks back to my point!
I think part of the problem is silicon availability and allocation.
After seeing what happened, and that state of the 50 series, they were probably tempted, but not only do you have to place orders months or even
years in advance for in demand nodes, meaning to do anything sooner they'd have to sacrifice producing something else, but additionally they'd need to tape the larger design out etc and make sure they didn't introduce any bugs, which is an involved, costly and time consuming process; all with am finite deadline for this target to make sense etc.
By the time this happened, assuming they'd pulled the trigger after the 9070XT launched and they saw the success they had, they'd have been looking at a release of about now, and at that point they probably figured they'd likely be dealing with Nvidia Super sooner or later, moving the goalposts, and potentially making the investment a waste of time...at which point it becomes far simpler and justifiable to focus on the next generation which should uplift the entire range; which I believe is still due next year.
Fundamentally, a 9080XT on RDNA4 could have been amazing, given how competitive the 9070XT is for the money, but they'd needed to have decided to do it earlier to have had it make the sense for the additional investment and sacrifices elsewhere it'd have cost; rather than after they saw the ****show that actually happened beginning of last year.
In HINDSIGHT, with the cancellation or massive delay on the 50 Super series, and the fact they weren't as far forward as had been expected, it'd have made massive sense, but these decisions will have been made 2-3 years ago; and they can only make educated guesses...sometimes that works out, sometimes (like now) it potentially didn't; and that's before we even factor in the memory market.
If producing a 9080XT/9070XTX had been quick and easy after it became clear the 9070XT was a massive success, they'd have almost certainly done it; but they were trying to cut costs, and get themselves back into the GPU game after some misfires and lost marketshare; and the time to market is far longer than many people realise (in fact that time to market is a large part of why we start hearing rumours about cards and architectures years in advance, because they genuinely are being worked on years out).
