I mean, you could have a bunch of other things in the GPU instead of those cores, but the reality is that ray tracing serves multiple target markets for GPUs ve

I mean, you could have a bunch of other things in the GPU instead of those cores, but the reality is that ray tracing serves multiple target markets for GPUs very well, and actually meets a demand people have: better graphical quality. In contrast, while I'm jealous of my friend with a 16GB 4080, versus my paltry 10GB 3080, it does not realistically impact anything I do outside of occasional ML retraining tasks. Neither did my old 8GB card. Gaming workloads just generally don't need it, because people there are mostly bound by compute, not texture or RAM limits -- and solutions like super-resolution/upscaling instead improve performance and memory usage all at once. > and it costs about $250 for a basic NVidia card today that can do slightly better Eh, the 3050 is like 30% more efficient in every single benchmark versus a 1060, with 30% more VRAM, and costs like $280. I don't think 30% is "slightly better". The Arc A750 also is around the same price point and is nearly 80% better, but I admit Nvidia has the best software stack on the market at the moment so the 3050 is a more fair comparison.