The consumer gets used to it. The CG effects in Toy Story 1 look dated, and if you were to watch the Incredibles and the Incredibles 2 back to back, you would also notice immediately. Or compare the movie "Gravity" to "Babylon 5".
Plus I've not even mentioned hair, fur and volumetrics. A staple in pretty much any feature film FX, they were completely absent in the real time ray tracing demos. Hair and fur are commonly not ray traced as triangles but use custom intersection routines. Those are an extra layer of complexity on top. I don't know yet how Nvidia's own API for the RTX card looks like, but Microsoft DXR and Apple's Metal ray tracing both are restricted to triangle geometry only.
This. You could do 100x more polygon and Ray Tracing, but consumer knows it is still CG.
I often wonder what will happen next? Once the economy of scale runs out for shrinking transistors. We have 7nm, 5nm and 3nm, and may be 450mm Wafers that leads to 2nm. We may only have 16x more transistor density improvements, and it seems 16x performance I still isn't enough for CG production.
I do remember Zoolandia a striking in terms of effects though.
I find a lot of movies today are falling in the Lucas trap: too much CGI (cost reign supreme I guess). It's a bad soil for movies...
Lets skip past the discipline and lets focus on the consequences. What are the consequences here?
Why is Nvidia's new chip potentially failing product market fit?
I'm merely explaining why and how Nvidia can show 5 rays/pixel @ 25pfs while we're at the same time budgeting several hours per frame for state of the art production rendering. Sure, more and better hardware will help film rendering. It always has.
But if the consumer can't tell the difference, does it matter?
Many films - in this example because we are talking about films - use a variety of visual techniques to reduce the complexity. Horror films for example rarely show the antagonist. The creature is shown in the dark, for split seconds, until a final expensive moment, leaving your brain to fill the rest in.
Although YOU can't unsee it, the audience, nor the studio, should care that the stormtroopers are rendered on a simple set with the snowstorm being used solely to avoid the necessity of rendering. The sound of the creature gave the effect of a complex monster lurking in the midst and I don't need a raytracing demo to show that.