I am saying that the performance hit you get from RT is generally providing a much better visual gain than whatever games used to spend performance on prior to RT becoming a thing
Indeed it is, Steve should be more pissed off about expensive Ultra settings that doesn't deliver much of visual gains, or about the CPU limited titles that severely impacts his precious high refresh rate gaming for no visual gain.
Take Dragon Dogma 2 for example, Hardware Inboxed critized the game for the not so great ray tracing implementation, while completely omiiting the bad CPU limited performance of the game which impacts the performance of the game whether ray tracing is active or not.
Some older versions of UE4 for example has this weird "Ultra" shadows setting which literally halves the framerate for pretty much zero visual change in comparison to "Very High"
Yeah, over the years I have documented many similar cases.
In Gears 4, the Insane screen space reflection setting had a huge performance impact that was equal to adding true RT reflections, despite having little effect on visual quality in comparison.
Similarly, in Gears 5 the software screen space global illumination setting also has a very massive performance impact despite adding very little to the final image, adding true hardware RT GI or reflections would have yielded a much better image quality outcome with similar or better performance profile.
In Assassin's Creed Odyssey, Watch Dogs 2 and Borderlands 3, setting volumetric clouds/fog to max plummeted performance badly for little image quality improvement.
In Watch Dogs 2, Arma 3, Crysis Remastered, using draw distance settings at their max values destroyed performance, because draw distance is CPU heavy, and our current CPUs are not fast enough single threaded wise. So we end up with horrific performance at max settings. Same thing applies to Flight Simulator games, whether 2010 or 2020.
In Quantum Break, running the game on native resolution destroys performance, the advanced lighting of the game was designed to be performant only when upscaled from lower resolutions.
Advanced non hardware RT methods for AO always end up costing massive performance, that remained true for VXAO (in Final Fantasy 15 and Rise of Tomb Raider) or Signed Distance Field AO (in Ark Survival Evolved), adding special shadowing techniques from the sun such HFTS (The Division, Watch Dogs 2, Battlefront 2) or PCSS (Assassin's Creed Syndicate) also cost massive performance.
All of these (and many others) are examples of effects that reduce performance by a huge amount, that can be replaced easily with real RT effects for a massively better image quality gain and/or performance.
