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It's practical utility or lack of thereof.

• Basically at the moment we pretty much only have Quake 2 running on obscene hardware requirements.
• Improvements from RTX in existing games are so minor that they're barely noticeable in many cases. Fakery, smoke and mirrors get quality almost to the same level.
• GPU-compute based approach seems like a saner approach in the long term, as any device capable of GPU compute will run it, and will offer more value, as it will be able to do more things.
• And specialized nvidia-only chip feels like vendor-lockin attempt.
• Ageia PPUs used to be a thing.
• Where are all the demos full of glass and mirrors?

Main point of concern is actually denoiser. I've not seen a lot of demos full of mirrors and glass. I think it has something to do with the denoiser and at complex scenes it screws up.

Spoiler

How about something like this?

There are also things like this:
https://www.reddit.com/r/controlgam...tracing_does_not_trace_rays_through_glass_on/

Spoiler

 

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Let's not forget Minecraft RTX. In fact Minecraft RTX is an excellent way to see the current limitations in the denoiser. If I recall correctly Digital Foundry shows them in one of their latest analysis videos.

Only because the hardware simply isn't there yet, and because it was a last minute implementation for existing games.

Ageia PPUs were created with the idea that they would handle all of the physics involved, but NVIDIA's RTX cores are only handling one aspect of the implementation: tracing the paths of the rays around the scene and which objects/triangles they intercept. It's basically just a BVH solver in hardware and nothing more.

Once the trajectory and intercepts of the ray have been determined everything is shifted to GPU-compute.

I'm not getting that impression at all. Microsoft is developing the API that both Unity and Unreal are working with, and it's not like NVIDIA is the only one calling the shots behind the scenes. AMD has been involved in the creation of DirectX Raytracing.

https://www.pcgamesn.com/amd/ray-tracing-microsoft-dxr-co-developed

 

If the hardware isn't there yet, what's the point of buying it?

And regarding RTX core, that would imply that not the whole card is a PPU, but RTX part of it is.

 

Just the same points as buying any other technology before it has had a chance to become ubiquitous.

Just because it's in there now doesn't mean it will be in there forever. It's an implementation detail that can and most likely will change in a few generations. If hardware was the only way to bring it to the masses then I'm perfectly fine with it being hardware for now.

 

Meaning not much practical use aside from emotional boost some people get from a new "toy"?

 

That, and the hardware needs to come out before the software does.