HT&L is a great analogy.

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).

That caveat makes the entire analogy wholly inapplicable. nVidia is using standard graphics technologies that AMD + Intel will eventually be able to implement in their own hardware, down the road. Games that support raytracing on rtx cards today will also support raytracing on future AMD cards.

Assuming Nvidia didn't lay down a patent minefield behind their implementation.

Exactly. The question at this point is: what's their patent situation like? They may be able to stop competitors from implementing the same technologies - which would clearly be a pretty worthwhile thing.

I wonder if Intel are about to have deep pockets?

> If the market likes it, over time we see fewer and fewer games that don't use it.

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?

If you are developing a AAA title with "hyper-realistic graphics" or a more artistic, cinematic game you can use raytracing to achieve effects which are otherwise 'faked', give you unique effects, or just to get more dynamic lights in scenes.

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.

Heck man, in the 90's, the most popular card [0] was a 3d only card. you still needed a regular video card for 2d. And yeah, apps had to be custom written to work with it.

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

It made sense at the time: everyone's computer already came with a 2D card (since integrated video wasn't a thing yet. Everything was cards.)

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.

> drivers were finicky back then—replacing your 2D card was signing up for a process not dissimilar to that of building a Hackintosh today.

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.

Used by nothing right now. The lineup of upcoming rtx games at nVidia's press conference was pretty substantial, it's just that most of them aren't out yet.

What is missing right now are games that are designed for RTX & DLSS (but they are coming), full of mirrors and shiny objects. All the games that are out use RTX to enhance the experience, which means that Ray Tracing is secondary citizen. Atomic Heart is an example of a game that really depends on Ray Tracing heavily for the best experience.

Unsure - When havoc physics (for example) came on the scene, the usual hype curve of adoption played out where there were were super gimmicky games that required it and relied entirely on game mechanics being pegged around the physics capabilities. It was a short-lived phenomenon. But, today, having that kind of physics engine and capabilities is part of a toolkit that developers draw upon, and many consumers expect to be included, rather than being a single central focus.

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.

Sounds interesting. An interesting difference between RTX and the previous techniques is that ray tracing is needed for modern film rendering. It just doesn't make sense that movies are still rendered with CPUs and not a more parallel architecture, so it feels for me that games are just a secondary for NVIDIA for the current version of the card.

No, I really think the situation is better than that. If you view the ray tracing as "something extra", almost like when shaders were first "invented". You use them to add softer shadows. Caustics. Interesting volumetric tricks. And people will just want them.

The "cinema quality on the cheap" crowd must be elated. Question is: how big is the market?