I even have doubts if it can reach 4070 Ti Super/7900XT level raster because if it only has 64CU's (TPU's placeholder page even says 56) then it will be difficult to close the gap to a 84CU card and then surpass it by 30% (difference between 7800XT and 7900XT).
It will have at least 64 CUs, maybe more, the 7800 XT already has 60 CUs, stay realistic.
Yes 290X launched in October 2013 and while Nvidia did release both the 780 Ti and the first Titan a month later those cards were more expensive while not being a whole lot faster. Titan was only miniscule 3% faster while costing obscene (for a gaming card at the time) 999 while 780 Ti was more reasonable 699 but still only 4% faster.
4% faster is 4% faster, that's far away from a W for AMD. If you want a W you must be clearly faster and not 4% slower. The 780 Ti was solely released to beat the 290X, which it did - and prices never matter for Enthusiast cards, we all know that, 500, 700, tomato, tamoto. Most people bought the 780 Ti over it. And also, the 290 vanilla easily outsold the 290X, AMD usually cut themselves back then by releasing a card which was 100$ less with just 256 shaders shaved off. They did some weird decisions back then, which since RX 7000 times they stopped doing. 6800 XT had only 512 shaders less than 6900 XT and also 300$ less msrp, another mistake by AMD. But the 7900 XT is 20% slower than the XTX due to them also shaving the bus off by 64 bit and reducing clocks perhaps as well. That's how long AMD needed to learn proper "product segmentation" but then again the 7900 XT was overpriced at launch and it needed months for them to correct the price.
290X at 549 remained the bang for buck choice until Nvidia released GTX 980 in September 2014 for also 549 that beat the RX 290 by a more convincing 13%.
Not for the vast majority of people, due to Nvidias mindshare most people still bought the 780 Ti over it, and then even cards like the 780 vanilla which was slower and had less vram. Lastly the 290X didn't even compete well with his own brother 290 vanilla which had nearly the same performance for 100$ less.
It wasn't until the middle of 2015 when Nvidia released 980 Ti for 649 that convincingly beat the 290X by 28% (and 390X by 21%) at much lower power consumption. So essentially 290X had at least 12 months of being the best value high end card.
No, the 980 Ti was released to compete with the Fury X, this is already a different generation and has not much to do with the 290X.