Actually they went great 16-bit and slow 32-bit and didn't support 24-bit at all, everything 24-bit was run 32-bit. AMD on the other hand supported 24-bit but not 16- or 32-bit and DX specified 24-bit as the default precision for all pixel shaders (vertex shaders were always 32-bit on everything)
IIRC nvidia's FX went mostly for maximum performance using 16bit pixel shader precision (which was widely used in DX8.1), but they also had the possibility of using 32bit precision though with significantly lower performance.
From what I understand the point is for the hardware to stay flexible. But little is known outside of that BVH customization. And I suppose some sort of tensor core logic for noise reduction, which may not necessarily be required.
..or use Radeon Rays to use AMD's denoisers which also works on Nvidia and Intel GPUs (admittedly only on Vulkan & OpenCL right now though..). Everybody' and its mama will have its own denoiser in the near future.
NVIDIA denoisers use hardware acceleration on the tensor cores on Volta and Turing though, they should be much faster. Unless AMD comes up with a similarly effective solution.
But limits you to only Turing/Volta, while AMDs solution works on current hardware too
The question of Ray Tracing is not about wide adoption as of right now. It's about who can run it with acceptable fps. Vega, Pascal, Maxwell and Intel offerings are irrelevant if they can't accelerate RT effects to a workable level.
I'm pretty sure it's only a matter of finding the perfect balance on how much shading performance you want to sacrifice on raytracing, we after all have RT-based game already out there (Claybook)
For the stuff shown with RTX, a hardware acceleration is needed to achieve a similarly convincing fidelity. Otherwise the IQ difference would be minimal as you scale down ray tracing to a visually unconvincing state, for it to work on normal shader hardware.
Claybook doesn't actually ray trace in the traditional sense. It's cone tracing. The creator of the game even admits that hardware BFV (RT cores) will make it's implementation even faster.
I'm not saying RT cores wouldn't make things faster, just arguing about if they're actually needed or not.
They obviously are needed if you want to achieve palpable Ray Tracing effects. If you want scene wide reflections or Global Illumination.
Biggest problem is that those resources can not be used for something else.
Before they've put out something you can't really say they're "at least a generation behind", one could argue NVIDIA was several generations behind on tessellation hardware when they first introduced it, but that didn't stop them from being a lot faster than AMDs solutions.
No, they just released Xavier which is Volta-based in June