[1] just look at Doom 2016: https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/20160...
If they hadn't done the hard work of basically retexturing every single surface, it wouldn't look half as good. Without depth, ray-tracing looks incredibly flat, like this: http://builder.openhmd.net/blender-hmd-viewport-temp/_images...
To add to this point, at 1:35 in the video they compare with / without volumetric ligthing except, well, volumetric lighting has been used in games for a while now.
The "before" should show a non-RTX lighting instead of just nothing at all.
Also, Qualcomm’s popular Adreno line on Android GPUs has its roots in the Xbox360 GPU.
I think the MMX era was the start of Intel's tradition of hyped up graphics related press releases followed by a total lack of execution.
All comes down to Microsoft and Intel coming up with a concept of purely software peripherals around 1997. Intel released things like MMX, AC'97, Communications and Networking Riser (CNR), and audio/modem riser (AMR) standards, all in an effort to push hardware vendors out of the market by handling those roles in software by the CPU. More work for CPU = more demand for fast CPUs = more profit.
Funnily enough AMDs 1998 3DNow! did actually add floating point support to MMX and was useful for 3D acceleration until hardware T&L came along 2 years later.
Intel Paid few dev houses to release make believe MMX enhancements, like POD (1997)
https://www.mobygames.com/images/covers/l/51358-pod-windows-...
1/6 of box covered with Intel MMX advertising while game used it only for some sound effects. Intel repeated this trick in 99 while introducing Pentium 3 with SSE. Intel commissioned Rage Software to build a demo piece showcasing P3 during Comdex Fall. It worked .. by cheating with graphic details ;-) Quoting hardware.fr "But looking closely at the demo, we notice - as you can see on the screenshots - that the SSE version is less detailed than the non-SSE version (see the ground). Intel would you try to roll the journalists in the flour?". Of course Anandtech used this never released publicly cheating demo pretending to be a game in all of their Pentium 3 tests for over a year.
https://www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?f=46&t=65247&start=20#p...
I'll never forgive the computer store guy when I was 14 who pushed me to buy the $40 cheaper S3 Trio3D instead of the Voodoo. Instead of something useful, I ended up with a glorified paperweight that only worked well for Direct3D. Guess how many games back then bothered to use that?
I think I got Quake 1 with some shitty hacked MiniGL driver working _once_.
All my school friends had 3dfx cards. Didn’t get to do 3D gaming until I bought a Radeon 8500 many years later!
Still have my 3dx actually...it was a very interesting card:
Most obvious to me in the quake logo/skull on the left of this[1] image.
1. https://images.nvidia.com/geforce-com/international/comparis...
The only downside that can be pointed out is that you are hardware dependent. Would be amazing to see thing in a console, all games with dynamic lighting would help developer and gamers.
In the linked demo video they also use new high resolution textures. Which include not only color data as in the original Quake, but also normal maps and maps with PBR parameters (metalness, roughness).
This is not just RTT; there's a big amount of rework. Likely, any old game would look significantly better with such development effort (in other words, with any good remastering).
This could be considered a great market stunt - the graphical improvement is touted to be due to RTX (ray tracing), while it's actually due to many factors.
On top of that, it misleads people into thinking that this type of improvement is typical of ray tracing, and that it comes at virtually no cost, while currently, ray tracing takes a big performance hit, and it's generally hard to notice.
Q2VKPT is close to the concept "improved with ray tracing", and while certainly impressive, it doesn't yield the same "AMAZING!" effect.