If they don't make the hardware, the software won't ever be developed. If the software is written and there is no hardware that uses it, well there's no usefulness there either. Plenty of people will still be satisfied with the 1080 ti and I think there will still be a robust market for it due to RTX pricing. Additionally, plenty of people will be willing to buy RTX and give ray tracing a try even if they have to "settle" for 60 fps, LOL. <snip>
The challenge was to make enough gains in architecture combined with the shrink to 12nm to fit the CUDA cores *and* the new RT cores *and* the new Tensor cores all on the same chip. If you are an RTX buyer then there's no doubt you are funding the new technology, but there needs to be some performance improvement in the old way of rasterized graphics to sweeten the deal and with 12nm and the asynchronous compute I am hoping this is what they achieved.