Understandably there are 2 major opposing angles against DXR. One the PC angle, and I can probably summarize this angle as; DXR goes against their hobby. And your quote here more or less sums it up:
This is the problem with the current first gen RTX cards. PC gamers who spend what it costs to get a RTX card want or are used to 100+ frames and at least 2k resolution. I've been told so many times by my "PC elitists" buddies or read on forums how 60 FPS is trash compared to 144fps.
The hobby of more horse power. For the longest time we've seen PC hobbyist pay top dollar to smash as many cards together to just get more and more performance. And this release really just completely 'resets' that entire mindset. Because RT isn't an upgrade to their car engine. RT is a different car entirely. And moving to this car, they lose all the benefits of their old car. There is a shift that needs to complete here for those people, and it will come as they see more benefit with owning the RT vehicle so to speak.
All in all, this is waiting game to see the opinions turn around on this one. It won't die out like PhysX or anything, I am always expecting a DF face off with PC RTX vs PC Ultra vs Xbox vs PS4.
The second angle is the console angle, it's slightly different. I will summarize this issue as being more of the opposite in which we likely hold 1P AAA studio titles as being the absolute cream of the crop of what a fully utilized console can do, and we don't hold the hardware as responsible. And we extrapolate that benchmark made by that studio and think, wow imagine what they could with 12 TF of power, I mean have you seen God of War, Spider Man and TLOU2 or Ghosts?
And I think what Shifty wrote here is more or less a variation of that: I've seen this before, it's not that much better.
The problem I have with that is the RT results don't look significantly better. Mostly when switching between RTX on and off, the results look different, but not obviously better. If the framerate plummets to get 'more accurate even if you can't really notice it much' then it's not an obvious win for RT. What I need to see from raytracing, if framerate and res are going to be limited, is looking a generation ahead, as raytraced graphics are capable of. Either that or producing marginally better/different results but at greater ease and realism (dynamic lighting, less artefacts). At the moment we're in the space of 'still looks like current gen games' rather than 'approaching photorealism'; the needle for improvement is only shifting slightly.
And you know what, maybe you're not wrong. Maybe we haven't been listening to this more intently. Perhaps it's entirely possible that the upper end of what the best developers can do with massive resources can take 10+ TF and find ways to just milk the hardware to take the game to the next level that perhaps RT can't compete with, or rather the compromises on resolution and frame rate are too great to compete with.
But there's a caveat there, rather several, that aren't in favour in going this route.
the first is the time it costs to put these marvel titles out there.
Compared to last generation:
- ND released 4 titles last gen. They've only released 1 this gen, and TLOU2 isn't coming 2019, so at best it's coming out in 2020 when next generation arrived
- Epic 4 titles - Gears 1-3 + Judgement -- we've seen only 2 Gears max this generation
- Halo - 3/4/Reach/ODST vs at absolute most 2, likely just 1 before next generation arrives
- Rockstar released only RDR2 -- GTAV was a remaster.
- SMS - God of War 4 vs Gow 3 + Absolution if you discount the time they spent on 2 PSP titles
- Polyphony - GT Sport VS GT 4/5 - 2 very complete titles last gen, only 1 title this gen with what many feel lack the amount of content as they are used to
So it's costly.
Should we be basing an entire generation around what the 'few' top studios can accomplish on the absolute upper end of rasterization optimization ? or does it make sense to consider a generation as a large shift of the mean of all the studios put together?
If we're talking console generations, I would hope it's the latter, I'm not interested in buying new hardware to see more of the same and once in a while get treated to a great 8 hr experience at 30fps in an adventure open world tightly controlled game, nor will I define a console 'winner' on a racing game that for the most part, most of the owners don't play.
The second is: if time is indeed costs; studios who want the best graphics can put out more titles faster than before, so not only would you have a better graphics across your library as a whole, but you're likely to have more of them.
The third caveat is but one that is often forgotten.
You're comparing PC Ultra settings DXR off vs PC Ultra settings with DXR On with a 2080TI. Your next gen console can't even reproduce those graphics with DXR off cause it's ain't going to be 13+ TF of Turing architecture, so we shouldn't even expect most next gen titles to get to that level of graphics before we even discuss DXR. You're comparing Ultra settings which do their best to get as close as possible to RT with actual RT and mistakenly assumed next-gen consoles are capable of Ultra when they are only capable of medium settings for the most part.
And very few games out there have dynamic GI. We can count them on our fingers. Dynamic GI is something that needed to be discussed and planned for at the beginning of title development, and we're seeing these developers add this render path within a year.
And last point, because our bias is to use the best of studios to represent what can be accomplished within the console verse, our bias are skewed because we don't see what these AAA exclusives could look like on PC ultra settings. But soon enough over the next 2 years when we see DXR title by DXR title come out, with more GI, shadows, AO, reflections, all these neat things AAA 1P found ways to optimize into their game, go everywhere abundantly without restriction, AAA 1P titles aren't going to be as special. And over time your opinion of what is the best looking will change and you'll wonder how you could possibly go into next gen without it.
Like the PC-centric angle, the goal here is for pro-RT folks to just wait and let the results do their work.
At this point in time, there's really no debate, we just need to sit back and wait for everyone else to have their moment and say, yup, it's now at the point where this makes sense for me. If next gen was coming out this year or next, this is a crazy debate. But I've got 2 full years of time on my side. 2 full years of PC titles coming out with new DXR options, and each time they bake the next RT effect into the engine, we're going to see it in the next set of games as well etc. Those console AAA 1P pedestal titles won't seem so special anymore.