I’ve noticed a few people say similar comments recently. Ray tracing is done via software that (typically) doesn’t require any specific hardware. It may be faster on specific hardware, but it’s plenty feasible in most GPUs. The whole RTX thing is marketing
In the 90s you could say rasterization is done via software that (typically) doesn't require any specific hardware. It may be faster on specific hardware, but it's feasible in most CPUs. The whole 3DFX thing is marketing.
More seriously, RTX adds custom acceleration hardware (fixed function hardware ray box and ray triangle intersection). Whether or not this hardware is required (or enough) for feasible mainstream adoption of real-time raytracing in commercial games is up in the air, but at the very least it turns making a performant, GPU accelerated, real-time raytracer from very hard and only usable in toy applications to relatively straightforward and almost usable in real applications. The RTX name is marketing but the hardware does add some value. As with anything once (if?) raytracer hardware is cheaper, more powerful and more ubiquitous it could have major effects on real-time rendering.
You can do ray tracing on an HP calculator or a postscript printer. You can do the calculations by hand too.
Saying it’s marketing is a little like saying your AMD ThreadRipper is just marketing and an ATMega328 is plenty feasible because the 20Mhz 8-bit processor can still compute anything.
The distinguishing feature of the RTX hardware is that it’s faster.
