It is very easy to tell the difference between a ray-traced game and a game that is not using ray-tracing.
Ray-tracing allows light to be simulated to act like it would in the real world.
https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/metro-exodus-ray-tracing-dlss,5992.html
The top most picture's reflections in the above would be extremely hard to get correct with simple rasterization.
Just as the Wright brothers first aircraft wasn't a Boeing 737, Nvidia had to start somewhere.
This isn't entirely true, since it's possible to simulate a lot of those lighting effects by pre-computing shadows. Most light sources in games don't tend to move much, so most lighting effects don't need to be performed in realtime.
Just look at some of the Unreal Engine 4 realtime architectural visualization demos, even ones from several years back, that have very realistic lighting without the need for specialized raytracing hardware. Sure, these demos might utilize mostly static lighting and small environments, and some reflective surfaces like mirrors might not look perfect, but for the most part these scenes look nearly photorealistic. And there are many full games that have very realistic lighting effects. Even on aging console hardware that's comparable to a lower-end gaming PC by today's standards, games like last year's Detroit: Become Human manage to have some really good-looking visuals.
Certainly, the raytracing hardware present in these cards can improve the quality of shadow and/or reflection effects in games that utilize it, but for the most part, the results could be considered rather subtle compared to what is already possible without it. I actually think it's great that this kind of hardware is getting added, as I find improving the realism of rendered visuals to be more interesting than simply pushing higher resolutions and frame rates. The problem is mainly that the general performance gains of these cards over what was available at their price points a couple years ago, are fairly underwhelming compared to what we have seen in the past following much shorter product cycles. Improved lighting effects are cool, but after this long, people expect more performance than these cards deliver. Either they should have focused on releasing cards with these new features a year earlier, before people felt starved for more performance, or released them later, when they could build them on the 7nm process, adding more performance as well as support for these effects. As it is, most who held off on buying a card the last couple years to wait for the next generation will likely still be waiting.
As for the Wright brothers, they weren't exactly selling their first working aircraft as a finished product. Compared to computer graphics, it would be the equivalent of a tech demo. Their very first plane only flew four times, never for more than a minute. Also, we're talking about the first people to get a major new form of transportation working, and who risked their lives to demonstrate it, not some moderately better lighting effects added to graphics simulations that can already look quite good without them.
I have to correct you here I was 1080FE user and changed to 2080 not Ti and I can tell you 2080 pure preforms 75-80% faster then 1080 all stock speed @ 4K and in some games I saw performance increase by 120% so thats all crap reading 10%, 2080 performs faster then 1080ti that's for sure let alone 1080, but in other hand too expensive and all that DXR hype you can forget unless DLSS is sported at same time and even then not in 4K but UWHD resolution. In BF 5 2080 without DXR outperforms in every scene 1080 by latest 65% and more in 4K and that freaking huge.
Those numbers seem a bit unlikely. While the 2080 is a little faster than a 1080 Ti, the 1080 Ti itself has been shown to only be around 35% faster than a 1080 when in mostly graphics-limited scenarios, such as at 4K. This review, for example, shows the 2080 to be on average only 45% faster than a 1080 at 4K, and only about 9% faster than a 1080 Ti, a card that was available at the same price nearly two years ago (and the Founder's Edition 2080 was actually priced $100 higher)...
https://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/NVIDIA/GeForce_RTX_2080_Founders_Edition/33.html
Out of the 23 games they benchmarked, only 1 managed to be over 60% faster at 4K, 3 were about 55% faster, 4 were about 50% faster, 5 were about 45% faster, 3 were about 40% faster, 6 were around 35% faster, and 1 was only about 30% faster. And again, the 1080 is not the card we should even be comparing against, since the 1080 Ti was available for the same price or less nearly two years. When people say the 2080 is not even 10% faster, they're comparing it to the similarly-priced 1080 Ti, the card that it is actually replacing. Nvidia may have shifted around product names to make the 2080 look more impressive when compared against the 1080, but the 1080 Ti is the card that it should be getting compared to.
...but it is still a choice and if AMD decides to reduce the price it could seriously impact nvida position in this range.
AMD likely can't reduce the price of the Radeon VII, as it's been estimated that nearly half the cost of the card is tied up in that 16GB of HBM2. So, it's not likely going to be much competition for the RTX 2080, at least not for gaming. You are still paying roughly the same amount as a 2080, despite not getting those new hardware features, and in fact are getting a little less gaming performance, only about on par with a 1080 Ti, which is again slightly behind the 2080. The 2080 might have been somewhat underwhelming in terms of performance gains over the 1080 Ti, but at least it brought something new to the table for gaming, however unutilized it currently might be. I don't expect AMD to have anything at that performance level that can undercut Nvidia's pricing until at least next year.
Now at the lower price levels, there are rumors that AMD may be offering performance comparable to a GTX 1080 in the sub-$300 price range later this year. And Nvidia likely knows this, which is why the pricing of their mid-range cards will likely be somewhat more reasonable. Already, we see the RTX 2060 offering better value than the rest of the RTX lineup, since they know they are going to have more direct competition at this performance level.