OptiX dev here. Ray tracing is more or less completely separate from the raster pipeline, which is what this article is discussing. There’s some conceptual overlap when it comes to shading, and both pipelines share compute resources, but the “pipeline” part doesn’t overlap much (and personally I think the reasons why are interesting). The RTX cards have a separate ray tracing core in addition to the raster processing hardware, so both pipelines still exist. What this means is Fabien’s article is still absolutely relevant to the raster pipeline, it’s just missing information about today’s ray tracing pipeline.

Most of this is still perfectly relevant. Looking over this again recently I was surprised how little had changed since.

RT is not a different step. Just like compute shaders are not a different step in the graphics pipeline but they're an independent thing. RT dispatches are their own concept and have their own rules.

It’s nitpicking.