Well, if that "consumer friendliness" is usable Linux drivers, then I don't give a shit about NVidia pushing the envelope, even if it means the graphics holy gr

Well, if that "consumer friendliness" is usable Linux drivers, then I don't give a shit about NVidia pushing the envelope, even if it means the graphics holy grail of real time raytracing. And is NVidia really the primary pusher of graphics algorithms and AI? Yeah, I doubt it. SUre they might contribute some things, but modern fabs have so much available transistor real estate that really NVidia is just trying to maintain market control by defining the computing interfaces rather than some fundamental achievement in computing theory. Raytracing algorithms aren't new, and they are "embarrassingly parallel" like most graphics algorithms, very well suited for modern chip fab design. If NVidia went away, Sony/Microsoft/Nintendo would just find another graphics vendor for real time raytracing. There were "processor per pixel" raytracer experiments in the mid 1990s when 66 MHz was "fast". If anything, real time raytracing likely has been suppressed by the massive investments in rasterization toolchains.