I will jump on the bandwagon. RT cores seem like a waste of silicon now that I have seen benchmarks. I think ray tracing should be done with more general purpose hardware, which would push actual use even further into the future.
I was expecting RTX cards not to be powerful enough for real time ray tracing to be practical.
GTX 1080Ti can do ray-tracing without the RTX cores. But, it would be even worst performance than it is now with BFV and RTX cards. This is why other Nvidia cards doesn't support them because it is pointless. Same is true for AMD cards. They can make it run with DXR-enabled. It just wouldn't run. Maybe 1 FPS.
The dip in performance with DRX enabled is not a surprise since the tech just came out.
What we don't know is if the performance can be improved with future software patches and optimizations down the road. And/or, if the RTX cores in the RTX GPU's are physically tapped out and that the RTX hardware has reached its limit without either adding more RTX cores and/or architecture tweaks in future RTX cards.
Also, we don't know if RTX cores, if say, a game isn't using DXR can be used for general compute task. FOr example, in MacOS, can the RTX cores be leveraged via Metal? To say, encode/decode/render videos, etc.? This is alongside, the regular CUDA cores and Tensor Cores? If, so, that's a lot of "compute" stuff to work with.....
In Windows, can RTX cores be leveraged doing non-ray-tracing tasks? We don't know!
Just general understanding of what makes an RTX core and also the Tensor Cores would be useful to know.
To say, if RTX cores are a waste of silicon is too early to say. Like, we don't know what makes an RTX core an RTX core and what it can do. We don't know if RTX-cores, for example, is fundamental to the Turing architecture in that they aren't just sitting idle-y in games that doesn't have ray-tracing enabled. For example, an RTX 2070 has less CUDA cores than a GTX 1080. But, in game benchmarks, an RTX 2070 always comes out ahead of the GTX 1080 and doing it with less cores. So, is the RTX-cores in the 2070 somehow being utilized there or is the architecture just so different that an RTX 2070 is outpeforming the GTX 1080 with more cores?
So, yeah, basically we need to really know what is an RTX core to be able to say, "It's a waste of silicon."
)) because I have owned nearly every kind of GPU since the 90s 
