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.