Where would those "killer games" come from?
Which insane manager would invest money into an AAAA (yes, 4 times) title that would not run on majority of gamer PCs?
A such game wouldn't have to be ray tracing only. I'm just thinking of a game that's amazes people enough that it becomes a "killer app".
As Crytek has demonstrated, hybrid Ray Tracing, as in "certain things are much easier to do with RT approach, compared to rasterization", one doesn't need dedicated RT hardware to pull it off:
I know, and it was kind of my point, you can get pretty good results in certain conditions with what we already have, and as you say, even without RT cores if used very cleverly. I've see demos where ray tracing has been used to do lighting for a low-resolution "voxel model" of the world, and then the rasterization uses this as a light map, giving sharp nice textures and "realistic" room lighting and shadows without any huge performance requirements. You can get away with probably 1 ray per 10 pixels for many scenes. It's for the specular lighting that we need the incredible performance do to ray tracing, e.g. for explosions, flames, sparks, sun gloss in water, etc.
There are no abstract developers with endless sources of money. It makes no sense whatsoever to spend too much time optimizing for PCs as there are too many combinations. For consoles, on the other hand... Compare GoW on PS4's 7870 to Witcher on 1080.
I think you missed the point.
Most game studios focus on quantity not quality, they want quick rapid development cycles, and they usually use plenty of money, possibly too much money. But the focus is on getting it done quickly, not done right. Doing software development takes time, and as any skilled programmer can tell you, if you don't do it properly and just stitch it together, it's going to be nearly impossible to "fix later". What they should do is to get the engine and core game properly working before they throw all the "content people" into the project. This requires more time, but not necessary more money in the long term. But share holders and management usually want quick turnover.
The problem here is The Leather Man. The guy who has ruined OpenGL and should not be allowed next to any industry wide specification, the guy who has managed to piss off major players to a point they act as if NV didn't exist.
You're way out of line here. That's not even remotely true.
Nvidia is pretty much the sole contributor to OpenGL since version 2.1, AMD have been limping behind and to this date not added proper OpenGL support.
RT will take off when AMD, who supplies 35% of discrete GPU market and 100% of performant console market, will go for it, and there will be little to no chance for TLM to influence it.
As you can see yourself in the Steam hardware survey, AMD's market share among PC gamers is ~14-15%, including APUs. While AMD sells about ~30% of discrete GPUs, about half of these are low-end OEM GPUs for home or office PCs, which is why they don't show up in game statistics. Their console foothold is substantial, but
not 100% (don't forget that thing from Nintendo), but the PC market is getting more dominant every year.
Yes, I'm talking about fully implemented RTRT. <snip> I have no idea what it would take to do that but if it will take 10X to 50X then it may not even come in my lifetime.
Still we don't know what Nvidia and AMD and Intel are working on for the future. Frankly, Nvidia surprised me with the Turings and their capacity for RTRT even a small as the implementation is.<snip>
I absolutely think it will come in your lifetime (I seriously hope you don't die prematurely
).
Hardware accelerated ray tracing is still in its infancy. While I'm only speculating here, based on a deep understanding of GPU technology, I think there is a good chance of a breakthrough in a 10-15 year timeframe, and not just from node shrinks and more RT cores, but ways to process batches of rays together, similar to how tensor cores are amazingly good at one thing.
