what makes you think the 60's and 70's ray tracing software and apps like blender and unreal engine and other things stopped existing? rtx is a chip that improves speed of ray tracing by about 10% .. every hardware device capable of running software and outputting to display ray traces you just need to use the right display renderer and output methods.
its analog tech from analog tv's that use lighting. you see you cant have an analog tv work without light.
all those animated news and lives sports events animated logos and colourful shiny words saying "instant replay" or "superbowl2000" or whatever.. those are all ray traced..
you'll have to be more specific.. which ray tracing function and method are you using?
were you trying for ray casting from the 1970's car commecial where instead of ray tracing rendering the entire world with light and often disabling shadows as they needed twice the perfomance they simply did ray cast shadows based on what the camera could see right in front of it based on a specific angle in a tiny wedge of the world.
are you referring to the traced rays? or fulltracedlightpathways? Did you possibly forget to enable your skinscache or your shadowscache? If you've an AMD computer that may work and perform much faster and better if the caches are done via the CPU instead of the GPU as it seems to for me.
which 3d software are you using? was it not working in houdini or maya or blender? or was it not working in unity or unreal or other apps? please explain in more detail.. its not a button you just click the application or game must be designed when creating it to have the light sources be set as the correct type for ray tracing lighting omnidirectional or direct or other lighting types exist. if the game dev stupidly grouped all the lighting in the software and set them to some lame ancient non ray traced 50's version or whatever then yeah what can you do. did you enable RTGI ray traced global illumination? and ray traced reflections? are you using VULKAN VXR? maybe try enabling DXR for directxraytracing with directx12 too.. or are you using the cryengine based games or editor and are using their custom ray settings/methods. you see unreal engine and other game software all use the simple hardware ray tracing commands for AMD devices which are for everybody and anybody to use to put into an OS or game editor/engine or 3d software and can customize the settings for quality/performance tradeoffs they believe suit their needs best. so they're all often reinventing the wheel. also nvidia keeps trying to disable it pretending without the 10% go faster chip it wont ever work when its a software feature thats always worked for 50 years. so if its vulkan you could if you wanted to code your own OS or whatever use the VK_KHR_RT function and spend maybe a day reading up on its uses and parameters and requirements and tweak and adjust it manually for your OWN IN HOUSE RAY TRACING METHODS to access and use the windows 10 directx12 hardware features. or the directx11 ones.. you can even do it on directx9 but it looks less shiny because latency and much lower resolutions as older hardware lower specs.. SD TV is 300x200? laserdisc and 1980's tvbroadcasts in japan were 1100p!!
but yeah you're probably better off using the vulkan one on linux VXR and then type RTXTRUE or whatever in a config.ini file or something and apply it to the OS and specify the renderer to use. The pixar hydra renderer and its plugins for blender or unreal are something interesting to consider maybe? are you using dualreflections? are you having issues with HYBRIDraytracing? DUALHYBRIDMAXFULLTRUEREFLECTIONS is pretty nice, theres also raytraced transparency. I like the FULLlightpathways. heres my config.ini that works with android pretty well any AMD mobile phone the last decade or so should get you ray tracing in just a few octillions of render resolution probably far more resolution possible but it gets way too small on the tiny screen.
https://www.mediafire.com/file/7nk7nkrw1autwrv/CONFIG.INI/file
