Hardware RT has had an enormous cpu penalty from the beginning. When I got my 3080 I tested out Control and was shocked by how heavy the cpu penalty was.
https://forum.beyond3d.com/threads/dxr-performance-cpu-cost.62177/
I've had a bit of an axe to grind with the major tech review sites by really under-valuing how important cpus still are for gaming on PC. You'll always see these benchmarks that show these low to mid-range cpus are good enough because they're always testing under conditions that flatten results because they hit gpu limits. Then ray tracing, or some other new cpu heavy game comes along, and that "low value" high end cpu suddenly looks a lot better. I'm glad to start seeing more sits testing 720p high/ultra to really show how cpu performance differs, but there's still a big lack of ray tracing inclusion in benchmarks.
For ray tracing to become pervasive we need a much better software stack, or some ground-breaking new ways to store scene information that is more cpu friendly. Consoles have some advantages on the cpu-side as well as the consumer expectation that 60 or even 30 fps (yikes) is good enough. Buying i7,i9,R7,R9 cpus is very expensive.
