Hard to fault this. It's reminiscent of when hardware transform & lighting (T&L) was introduced. Nothing used it until the cards existed, but the cards had to come along before anyone would bother coding it into the games.

For those who weren't around during the first wave of hardware 3D acceleration (circa 90s), there was a huge amount of "X brand only accelerates this and that game."

Nowadays, with DirectX and OpenGL (somewhat) winning the API war, a GPU is a GPU for all games.

It seems entirely reasonable raytracing hardware and game support follow the same path. Supported in some hardware, supported in some games. If the market likes it, over time we see fewer and fewer games that don't use it.

* Caveat: Things are a little different this time since DirectX 12 supports Ray tracing today, as far as I can tell. And Microsoft doesn't really care who wins between Nvida and AMD (aside from keeping suppliers in competitive bidding for XBox GPUs).

I wonder if Intel are about to have deep pockets?

You can use accelerated lighting even in a 2D game, but I'm unclear on what casual games would be using ray-tracing for. Have a particular vision of the future you'd like to share?

Indies and less realistic or more "casual" games may not bother with it, just as many of them don't bother with things like parallax mapping and some don't even bother to use textures at all. The features are there and easy to use but developers opt in and out of the different rendering options based on their artistic styling.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3dfx_Interactive#Voodoo2

There was no pressing need to replace your 2D card, and in fact you might actively dread it (drivers were finicky back then—replacing your 2D card was signing up for a process not dissimilar to that of building a Hackintosh today.) And computers back then had a lot of room and a lot of spare PCI slots. So why not buy a separate card just for 3D, leaving your existing 2D card intact? Smaller change to worry about.

Hmm, certainly in the 80s and maybe very early 90s but by the time Voodoo cards came along things were much better. Still not up to the "plug and play" level of today, however.

I'm predicting this will be the same kind of story playing out again - One vendor kicks it off, some 'demo' games that build heavily on it drop but are quite short-lived, and the tech slowly turns into a commodity feature with in-game settings menu 'on/off' selectors, followed eventually by ubiquitous support to the point that nobody really talks about it any more, it's just part of 'modern graphics'.

Shaders is another good example that followed that kind of pattern, it was all the shit in the late 90s that Q3 had 'shaders', now it's not even a bullet point for most releases, but it's certainly there.

I've rambled, but my point is that I'm not sure a lynchpin 'RTX required' game is needed at all to drive industry-wide adoption here.

On one hand, there is the appreciation for the technical achievement of something that seemed unlikely for a while (real-time ray tracing), plus as you mention, then increased die size. They look to be pretty good for ML applications, as well.

On the other hand, there is the increased price and, frankly, underwhelming results. The only game that uses the RTX feature suffers substantial performance penalties for turning on the RTX feature and most people (including me) just try it out for a few minutes and then turn it off. Is the quality better? Yeah, the reflections are shaper and more consistent when changing views (ie, aiming down a sight), but they aren't game-changing and are definitely not worth the performance penalty.

This generation of cards is worth skipping if you aren't building a new computer.

That said, this comes with a pretty big cost, both in $$$ and performance. If this could be accomplished without the substantial performance hit that it seems to come with, then it would be fairly impressive and worth the $$$.

Or, come to think of it, a "Half-Life 3: Portal 3" where you use gravity+portal+various paint (and other liquid) guns, on an alien ship and in space, would make a lot of sense...

I personally do think the raytracing footage we've seen is a significant step up, however.

However, nothing will be the step up that bumpmapping brought to the table. Doom 3's textures look like garbage with that disabled, due to the bump/normalmapped greebles all over them. Everything looks like clay or cardboard.

I may be (read am) an old git, and ray tracing just makes me think Wolfenstein 3D. I assume this is a different raytracing? Is it the origin of the rays rather than coming from the 'eye', coming from the light source? Isn't that inefficient? Or something else???

According to the wikipedia ray casting article, the two were used interchangeably "in early computer graphics literature", just to make me feel even older.

I think you have it backwards. Ray tracing is O(#of pixels*number of light bounces). More common 3D rendering is based on O(# of objects in the scene). It's conceivable that ray tracing can be more efficient for scenes with many objects.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bidirectional_scattering_distr...

Actually, nVidia's raytracing stuff is—somewhat-uncharacteristically for the company—all done in open APIs.

Don't buy the first generation of anything unless you've got money to burn. Get the second or third.

No, you'll get something worn out after running flat out for a year in a Monero mining farm.

I seriously doubt that we can take this for granted: the RTX 2080 will almost certainly remain near the state-of-the-art for several years.