...and the one thought running through my head was how gosh-darn good real-time graphics have been at faking real world lighting without the need for ray tracing.
Solid art direction also shines a great deal here regardless of ray traced or raster methods. There's no amount of Unreal Engine magical math fuckery that can truly sub for an art director and a murder of artists with great eyes.
Portal RTX is meant to be as much of a showcase for NVIDIA's bolt-that-ray-tracer-on-the-existing-game devkit as it is for RT-capable hardware in general. I'm not going to be one of those people who drops the "just because you can doesn't mean you should" line; I think ray tracing is neat as hell, and has a lot of potential if deployed thoughtfully. I would urge excited devs to really think hard on what adding RT support to existing or upcoming games really means to the art in the game.
Also, please, I don't care if a material is "really like that". Tone down the damned metallicity channel for your PBR materials. It's such a huge tell that someone really wasn't considering the visual end result when I'm walking around a virtual space that looks soaking wet. Pretend you're on Arrakis or something, sheesh.
