In the end, it’s important to note that we are still in the very early days of hardware ray tracing. Though I don’t believe it will take decades, maybe 3 years or so.
Yeah, well, I can’t really argue there, GameWorks is a complete ■■■■, but RTX is something completely different and unrelated. NVIDIA have, from what I’ve seen been quite open to other companies implementing hardware ray tracing. And while DXR is Windows-only, I believe it is a major step in the right direction to have a generic implementation for using ray tracing in games from day 1. That isn’t something we’ve ever had in the past. As for , it’s only a matter of time until they have some sort of equivalent to DXR.
Of course, there’s a lot more to those RT cores than DXR and mixing ray tracing with rasterisation. So I agree that right now it’s hard to say if there will be an open equivalent to NVIDIA OptiX (which allows you to use the RT cores for general purpose ray-tracing for things like Hollywood productions and maybe Unreal Lightmass). Ultimately though, it probably wouldn’t matter as there are only a few renderers available, and they can add vendor-specific support as required in a worst case scenario.
Anyway, let’s just give it time, they have a promising start going, let’s see how to evolves.