I am actually underwhelmed by this demo... Not because it doesn't look great—it does—but because this is about par for the course for a next-gen GPU demo. They

I am actually underwhelmed by this demo... Not because it doesn't look great—it does—but because this is about par for the course for a next-gen GPU demo. They always look fantastic for definite reasons, not strictly hardware improvement. Remember nvidia's 'Dawn' demo from 2003? https://youtu.be/4D2meIv08rQ?t=48 https://youtu.be/4D2meIv08rQ?t=48 They put together super high quality demos like that for every new generation of card they released. The games that followed never looked quite as good since there are far more demands put on one's computational resources to generate a playable game world vs. a single scene that needs to look great. What would be potentially very interesting is to see the difference in work put into producing this with raytracing vs. traditional techniques. Being able to displace the unholy nightmare hodgepodge that comprises contemporary real-time rendering algorithms is the most exciting thing about raytracing. At least that's potentially the case; not clear to me how much improvement has been made possible by the RTX. EDIT: and, making me think this new one is part of a lineage of sorts, here's a later Dawn demo from 2012 (I think): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bI1_quVr_3w https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bI1_quVr_3w EDIT2: rewatching, other aspects of this demo (i.e. not rendering specifically) are beyond 'par for the course', imo. But it's just generally higher production values, indicating more time/money/attention was put into producing the short itself, independent of the hardware backing it.