It's embarrassing seeing people who normally embrace tech advancement fighting against RTRT so hard.
Of course hardware that improves handling RTRT is too expensive. It's supposed to be. Remember when cell phones were new or SSDs?
RTRT kills the performance of my GPU. It's supposed to. It's for the future. It's not for past GPUs.
Nvidia is taking control of RTRT with RTX GPUs. They may try but they will fail. AMD already has a hardware solution for handling RTRT better with the upcoming PS5. Intel has a solution as well.
Developers are slow to embrace RTRT and some implementations are sloppy. Time takes time.
To me it looks like a good thing for gamers eventually but there are of course some rough spots right now.
I can only speak for myself and to clarify, I do believe that RTRT belongs in future 3D render engines.
The major caveats, in my opinion, are that NVidia halfassed the implementation big time.
We know, that rendering with RTRT can deliver better illumination, shadow casting and reflections than any comparable rasterized renderer could, in some cases it even enhances other render technics, like e.g subsurface scattering or physically based rendered textures quite a bit.
But neither the current software does nor the current RTX hardware could.
Battlefield 5 / METRO Exodus had to tune every RTX effect back, to achieve fluid 60+ fps @ 1080p with the 2080ti / RTX TITAN.
Shadow of the Tomb Raider only implemented RTX shadows.
For RTRT to clearly up the ante compared to current rasterized rendering, you need the full suite:
Global illumination with a sufficient amount of sample rays and bounces to get proper lighting, shadows, and reflections at 60+ fps.
RTX, unfortunately, is not optimized enough to deliver that with the current RTX cards, especially since only the upper range of cards (2080, 2080SUPER, 2080 TI, RTX TITAN) could push the current RTX implementations at proper framerates and resolution.
Add to it, that it is an proprietary feature to Turing and the 20xx series received an extra bump in price over the last generations steadily rising prices.
You get really hard-pressed, to applaud Nvidia for their innovation here.
They delivered RTRT, yes, but at a mediocre level against traditional rasterized rendering with a steep price premium.
One can only hope that the somewhat bad impression Nvidia printed on RTRT in trying to corner the market with RTX, gets dispelled with the coming solutions from Intel and AMD.