The benchmark is bugged with RT on. If I run the benchmark back to back, the 2nd time is significantly worse, and the 3rd is even worse, etc. But in game seems to be okay. I made 2 videos comparing RT on and off for my 3070 using Shadowplay, there does appear to be some performance hit when I played in game with this on. Please watch in HDR if your monitor supports it, if YT rendered it correctly, you should get at least 1440p. HDR makes much more of an impact visually than RT.
This is without RT.
This is with RT turned on via the config file change.
You can compare this to someone with a RX 6800 XT to confirm the RT setting is working.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7QwdbyVEJhY
It seems that with RT, you lose a lot of the "fake" shadows? There's just a lot less for some reason. Maybe it's more realistic? Or the game is not using a lot of rays or very limited. Perhaps that's why the performance hit is not that significant. But in any event, I don't like it, I prefer the "fake" shadows. This game is unplayable with Epic settings unfortunately for me, have to drop to high to get 60 fps. It really is somewhat of a bait and switch, the game was performing really well in the tutorial section of the game. Once you start the real story, fps dropped significantly. Getting back on topic, vram does not appear to be the problem, or I haven't ran into it yet. The game just perform really bad at high resolution, it really needs DLSS even without RT.
I just noticed something in my videos and the 6800XT one, computer RAM usage is significantly higher with RT on. Another mystery with this game. I think I'm going to hold off playing more of this game until the developers can tune it, it really needs a 30% improvement.