That’s a bold statement to make without knowing how many flops were sacrificed at the altar of RT hardware. It’s an absolute certainty though that those lost flops would be woefully inadequate for real-time RT.
How do we know that? Because we already have 16+ teraflop monsters that are woefully inadequate at real-time RT. Anyone who wants to build solutions on programmable hardware already has an abundance of options today.
I do not make 'bold' statements. I only say my personal opinion and share my experience, aiming for discussion, not to proof speculative thoughts.
To see how much GPGPU 'flops' is lost, just take a die shot and look up the area RT and Tensor cores take. I do not say those cores are useless - i only speculate: 'What could we do with more general purpose cores instead?'
That's just a question. I am not sure myself which option i would choose, because we likely never know how the alternative would progress (assuming other vendors follow with specialised, fixed function cores).
Terflop monsters however are NOT inadequate at real-time RT. I know this from personal experience. I don't need to proof this to myself, i only need to look at my screen here. I will not proof it to you.
However, the kind of RT that i do is very different from the classical approach we discuss here. My approach has opposite strengths and weaknesses. RTX can solve my remaining problems, fill up missing details, that's why i'm interested.
So, RTX and my work should form a nice couple to approach realtime photorealism further. I'm not here to argue against RTX.
From my perspective, seeing my solution already solving the GI problem with good details, it makes sense to question the need for dedicated fixed function hardware just to 'fill up missing details'.
It also makes sense to question the need for two implementations of BVH.
It makes sense to request programmable hardware so sharing work would become possible.
From my perspective it makes sense to question the acceleration of classical raytracing at all. Because for me it is eventually an outdated idea. But i'm not sure because i did not start work on solving the missing details myself, and now with RTX i probably never will.