That's like going back to when Terminal Velocity had just been released for the S3 Virge (which just barely managed to do bilinear filtering at 640x480 at 15fps) and saying welp, this sucks, show's over boys, hardware accelerated rendering has failed.
I had forgotten about that trash board. Games of the time (Descent, etc.) looked better AND ran faster using only CPU. My first 3dfx Voodoo was a revelation.
Or GPUs haven't been powerful enough to support it properly for ages
TL;DR
> Even here though, I didn't feel like ray tracing was actually doing much to improve, or even change, gameplay.
Why would eyecandy be expected to change gameplay?