If I turn ray tracing on, how much does it tank performance? What GPU performs at that lower FPS? Compare the prices. That's how much extra I'm paying.
E.g., the $700 RTX2080 with ray tracing performs as fast as the $300 2060 with ray tracking off. Therefore, I'm paying $400 for ray tracing.
I've never looked at it that way, it's an interesting thought.
I think it doesn't take into account any gains in image quality though.
I think a more realistic look would be, looking at just raster performance, and finding an equally priced card from Nvidia. Say 2080 vs 1080ti. Both were $700 at launch.. oh that doesn't work. I guess you need to take into account the improvements gen on gen with price ratios. That makes it hard too.
Perhaps we need to look at die sizes, as that's more comparible gen on gen. Seems people think it's only 7% or so for raytracing. Comparing 1080 ti and 2080 die sizes is around 16% differences, I guess that would also be tensor cores and other changes in architecture in there too. Either way, for a given defect rate, and the size of die, you'd get around 1.22x more dies per 300mm wafer (71 vs 58), but I have no idea how much a 300mm wafer on 12nm costs. Apparently the wafer costs would be around $400, but obviously samsung/tsmc would charge much more to cover their manufacturing and research costs, perhaps $5000?
if it was around $5000 per 12nm 300mm wafer charged to Nvidia, it would be around $70 for a 1080 Ti die, $86 for a 2080 die. Obviously these are losey goosie numbers, since I don't know the actual cost of the wafers that Nvidia is charged, could be $2000 could be $8000, I also don't know the defect rate.
But for any arch changes from 1080 Ti to 2080 (ray tracing, tensors, etc..) it's around $16 give or a few bucks, since raytracing is only about half of those transistors, perhaps it's more like $8 for just the raytracing. Perhaps with more power usage, the boards need to be populated with more VRMs, and better cooling, which would add additional cost. Nvidia would also want to cover those "millions" of hours of development of the real time ray-tracing too.
I donno... perhaps $20, and then $80 for Nvidia to cover their 'costs' ? $100?