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.
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:
Also, Qualcomm’s popular Adreno line on Android GPUs has its roots in the Xbox360 GPU.