AMD cards don't yet have any raytracing support, right? I know it's a young technology, but they shouldn't be dragging their feet on it if they want to make a serious push for the top.
Firstly, it's not really as impressive as it sounds. You aren't going to be playing a game where you explore a house of mirrors any time soon. Control is a really good implementation, and it's so good it makes it really clear how quickly it falls over.
Better than not ray tracing, but nowhere near non-real time traditional ray tracing.
Secondly, at least with the current generation of RTX, the performance hit you take is criminal. We're talking 40%. If you're most people, who buy a graphics card to a budget based on your requirements (say 1440p/60, or 1080p/144, or whatever), supporting ray tracing means you either need to massively over spend (in my calculations about 6 months ago, I would have had to double my budget), or drop your quality presumptions in resolution and framerate drastically.
Which brings us to third: support. RTX has been out for over a year, and there is really only 2-3 games where RTX makes any kind of interesting visual difference, and really only 1 (Control) that you're actually going to actively notice after playing for more than 5 minutes.
AFAICT then, RTX is useful as a fun demo to play around with for a few minutes, before disabling it and getting your framerate back so you can actually play the game, and for absurdly rich people (which is convenient for nVidia, because absurdly rich streamers have normalised 1080p gaming on 2080tis for awhile now).
I am looking forward to seeing the shape real time ray tracing takes on consoles, because I presume that will determine the true shape for the next decade or so.
I never really understood this argument. If you really need tons of frames for a competitive game, just turn it off. Otherwise, the games that implement it correctly show a marked visual improvement, that can't be computed any faster as far as we know. It's like saying 4k renders 4x slower than 1080p, so it's not worth it unless you can get the same frames. You can, it's just a premium technology and you'll need to budget accordingly.
(this ignores the games that half-ass their raytracing and make almost no perceptible improvement, which to be fair is most of them)
I do agree though, that Control (and Metro Exodus) are the best examples. Every other RTX title just uses it for reflections, which are neat but not as much of a categorical upgrade as RTGI, imo.
People who spend serious chunks of time gaming (but who also remember what reality looks like...) will increasingly notice the inaccuracy or lack of ambient occlusion and shading overall.
This time last year, RTX, in popular discussion, was a joke. I'm seeing more and more people who've looked into it, can see the objective improvement, and are ready to adopt it once as it enters their budget range. It would definitely be a sore sport if Navi had even worse raytracing performance than the RTX series, or none at all. As the hardware proliferates, there will be more and more reason to developers to look into implementing it at its best.
Crazy idea: Maybe we could train a neural network on before/after images of raytraced scenes and implement it with a constant, minimal penalty, like DLSS, or maybe that requires too large of a network or maybe it results in a trippy mess.
I think "if you need tons of frames" may be where your misunderstanding is coming from: most of us don't have tons of frames to give (especially in brand new AAA games that are the only ones implementing this technology).
For most people (and you can see this in sales data and hardware surveys), if they are looking to buy a new graphics card they are going to be buying one that they think will fit their needs for the next few years, not massively overshoot it. If you play games at lower than your monitors resolution, they look bad. If you play games at lower than your monitors refresh rates, you either get bad looking tearing, or lose a much larger proportion of frames than you need to.
To use myself as an example: I recently upgraded my computer that runs on a 3440x1440/60 monitor. My goal was to play games at 1440p60 for the next 3 years (ie until the new console generation settles and we know where things are going). I bought a 5700XT because it provided the best bang for buck, hit 1440p60 in most games benched, and it seemed reasonable that I could drop setting here or there and maintain good frame rates until I was done with it.
The nVidia option was a 2060S / 2070, which would have given me slightly more frames at 1440p, but for $50 more. If I wanted 1440p60 and RTX, I would have had to go all the way up to the 2080ti, which was roughly double the price.
Especially because it's probably first person and over-the-shoulder games that probably get the best benefit from RTX, but those are the same games where a high frame rate improves playability the most. Not 'tons' of frames to be 'competitive', but 144Hz to be able to perform the actions you intend to perform without frustration. So at that framerate, in a pretty game, maybe you could run RTX at 720p? But resolution is pretty nice too, so the performance hit really is a big deal.
The kind of game where you'd get 300Hz and can burn frames on a whim isn't the kind of game that uses RTX, at least so far. Or you'd have to drop the other settings to low, which kind of defeats the point of improved visuals.
I don’t doubt it will be fantastic once it’s actually usable in the sense that people will choose to enable it. I fear next gen consoles, like current top end PCs, will have settings where you choose 4K/60fps/raytracing and you can enable two of them, or possibly just one. In priority order, raytracing is a distant third of those.
I think they are all moving to it because they know they need to get there eventually, and they need consumers to pay for it all the way.
It's definitely possible to do it yourself in many cases, and while Nvidia have their amazing RTX technology now, for the sake of not having a GPU computing monopoly it's important to push for open standards support. There is DXR supporting multiple vendors, which is sort of one step forwards and two steps back (Windows-only)...