>>718740023
Ray tracing was introduced because developers are at the end of their bag of tricks to try to get photo-realism out of rasterized lighting solutions.
It WAS, however, introduced two hardware generations too early for it to be a useful feature because Nvidia wanted a flashy feature to sell cards. It wasn't worth using before the 4000 series, and should have never been pushed that early. Make no mistake though, it's not a gimmick, it's the only realistic path forward, and anyone with any real knowledge of rendering will tell you the same thing.