Nvidia showcases nine upcoming ray traced blockbuster games

[kalniel]

I know enthusiasts expect to pay for the new features but this is one feature that really does not justify the price tag.

Unless someone comes out with a game-changing new way to fab (and increase the power of) GPUs, I fail to see this ever taking off. If we were getting the same gains for the same £££ as 5-10 years ago, then yes it would become standard pretty rapidly but at the current rate of performance/£, its dead in the water IMO.

I could be wrong, but I think aspects of RTX are only being accelerated by a small, dedicated, portion of silicon at the moment. This is gen 1 afterall. Work is improving presumably on two fronts: dedicating more/faster silicon to it, and accelerating aspects of ray tracing on other silicon. Ray tracing is coming to the next consoles for example, and they won't be using tensor cores.

Both of those lead me to predict the performance/£ is going to rapidly improve over the next few generations, to the point I would actively avoid going with these gen 1 products.

[HollyDOL]

It will take some time and birth pains but hopefully raytracing will settle as mainstream soon. nVidia made a leap of faith here, big one, and I definitely don't like the $$$ extra it adds atm, but hopefully in long term this will lead to just "next gen shaders" for all.

If it wasn't for huge library of engines having various light resembling techniques already implemented though, it would be so much simpler to implement various effects using raytracing (as it is much more natural than for example rendering scene in black&white to the texture and then apply the texture in real scene surfaces to create "shadow"). With better result too. Also, in general raytracing is pretty much ideal parallelization task, a decent advantage too.

So my hopes are devs in future could burn less time for better result on graphics front and rather spend more time on game content (ok, I know it's wishful thinking)...

[Jempa92]

Will this be a thing that just goes away similar to physx as I don't see many games use physx any more when at one point it was a big thing.

[Scrupulous]

I hate feeling the need to have these new technological advances in my hardware, the last one was HDR and I still don't have that. Maybe I will have to give ray tracing a miss as well then. Sounds like HDR was more of an improvement but I have my brightness so far down on my TV I doubt that would amaze me much either.