The thing that strikes me with the RTX announcement is a general point about how important identifying useful intermediate steps are to bringing about new paradigms.

Unless a technological breakthrough is just around the corner, or you have the resources to push it forward (Space Race / Manhattan Project), it’s better to spend your energy identifying useful intermediate steps that you can offer to the market to fund & bridge yourself to the new paradigm. By having funding all along the way, you can gain a significant advantage to those pursuing the new elegance directly. [1]

A few examples:

STREAMING. People used to go to video stores to rent movies. As the internet emerged we dreamed of a new, more elegant paradigm: streaming. No more driving to a store, no more physical copy or late fees or damages, etc. But it was the clever discovery of an intermediate step - to use the internet to rent DVDs via mail - that created the brand and customer base that established the market leader (Netflix). Once internet infrastructure caught up, the switch was seamless. Meanwhile, there were many people who pursued streaming directly, but failed because they didn’t take the intermediate step (Broadcast.com).

ELECTRIC CARS. Traditional cars have super complex drivetrains. As battery tech improved, we dreamed of a new, more elegant paradigm of electric vehicles that improved efficiency and eschewed most moving parts, transmissions, exhaust systems, etc. But there existed a valuable, infrastructure-free intermediate step to get there: hybrids. Ironically they were even more complex, but they employed many new techs that helped move electric cars forward. Toyota has hugely benefitted from being the discoverer of this intermediate step. Obviously we now have Tesla leading the vanguard, but in the context of global development, nobody can predict if an Elon will show up in your generation.

AUGMENTED REALITY. Our current physical reality is awash in information - street signs, road paint, branding, menus, maps, clocks, games, warnings, nutrition labels, interfaces, etc. These are often completely irrelevant to us at a given time, and certainly not personalized to our needs. We dream of the day we can render overlays on our eyes to deliver the personalized versions of these (as well as entirely new things), which would over time mean our physical reality would get simpler, cleaner, and less wasteful. To deliver this elegant solution requires a lot of breakthroughs in display technology that are years if not decades away. Bundling SLAM tech into smartphones (looking at you Apple) and pursuing incremental use cases is an intermediate step that can grow the market until the point where the displays are ready, at which point those who best pursue this are likely to be the market leader.

Ray tracing is now on the same course. It's been known for decades that it is a far more elegant paradigm to reason about and generate images (vis-a-vis rasterization), but its compute requirements are so high that there's been this chasm people haven't been able to cross to get to ray tracing. Nvidia has now provided a bridge between these two worlds, by allowing raytracing of parts of the rendering pipeline alongside rasterization. Subsequent generations will slowly swallow the remaining parts that rasterization performs today. Basically the RTX is the graphics card equivalent of a Prius, growing into a full electric.

The addition of ray-tracing cores in the RTX line was a pleasant surprise to me, not only because it speeds the development of ray-tracing hardware, but because it showed intermediate steps existed that I didn’t know about before. It showed me we weren’t stuck waiting indefinitely for a promise of an elegant future that always seems a decade away. Pretty exciting.

[1] What I mean by paradigm is not just incrementalism or an evolution of one product into another (like iPod -> iPhone), but of a wholly different way to solve a problem that is more elegant / higher abstraction than previous ways, but that require breakthroughs in enabling technologies to get there. Rockets -> Space Elevators (material science; elegance is in ease of transport), Retail -> Online Shopping (internet; elegance is in personalization + stay-at-home), Coal -> Solar (energy storage; elegance is in eco footprint, low entry point & simpler tech), Driving -> Autonomous Driving (ML/sensors; elegance is in time savings / one less thing to learn & simplification+density of road infra). This is admittedly a fuzzy definition, and perhaps these examples are not perfect.