bit_user :
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If you read it carefully, they don't actually say the Siren demo was raytraced. And if it were, I'd have expected this to be mentioned on Unreal's on blog, which went into considerably more depth.
I agree the focus of Siren demo was not ray-tracing, but about realistic skin, eyes, hair, etc - and much reflections. But if ray-tracing was available and used the same RT/Unreal4 engine as the other related demos, why not use it to simplify making the lighting and shadows? I changed my original post from Siren example to Star Wars because I just wanted people to see ray-tracing can make a scene more photo-realistic that just taking an existing game that not made with RT in mind, then adding reflections.
Some complain even the good looking ILMxLAB/Unreal demos only have 1 or a few people and nothing like a complete game. If history is repeated, it only takes 2 - 4 years for the ultra-cool demo to be a full large open-world game. For example, the Nvidia Dawn/Dusk video of 2003 was realistic at the time but with only 1 person, but just 2 years later came Farcry 1, then Crysis came out which looked even better than the Dusk demo. Another example is the The Good Samaritan 2011 Unreal Engine3 demo in 2011, then Witcher 3 was in 2015.
So, if history is anything to go by, full size games that look as good as the ILMxLAB/Unreal demos may take only 2-4 years or 1-2 card generations - about the same time as the next-gen consoles.
I personally got a GTX 680 which lasted me 6 years (can still play Witcher 3 on high settings), I expect 1 2080 ti to also last 6 years.
my humble opinion.