>>We are left to speculate why devs are doing this.
Well, I am a gamedev, and currently lead of a rendering team. The answer is very simple - because ray tracing can produce much better outcomes than rasterization with lower load on the teams that produce content. There's not much else to it, no grand conspiracy - if the hardware was fast enough 20 years ago to do this everyone would be doing it this way already because it just gives you better outcomes. No nvidiabux necessary.
> There's not much else to it, no grand conspiracy
True, in that raytracing is the future. Though I don't think it's a conspiracy rather than just the truth that "RTX" as a product was Nvidia creating a 'new thing' to push AMD out of. Moat building, plain and simple. Nvidia's cards were better at it unsurprisingly, much like mesh shaders they basically wrote the API standard to match their hardware.
And just to make sure Nvidia doesn't get more credit than it deserves, the debut RTX cards (RTX 20 series) were a complete joke. A terrible product generation offering no performance gains over the 10 series at the same price with none of the cards really being fast enough to actually do RT very well. They were still better at RT than AMD though so mission accomplished I guess.
Well, I am a gamedev, and currently lead of a rendering team. The answer is very simple - because ray tracing can produce much better outcomes than rasterization with lower load on the teams that produce content. There's not much else to it, no grand conspiracy - if the hardware was fast enough 20 years ago to do this everyone would be doing it this way already because it just gives you better outcomes. No nvidiabux necessary.