I think people vastly underestimate what Quake 2 RTX is showing off - unlike Minecraft the RT implementation does not benefit from the lower res geometry and other relatively simple rendering features and scaling up the geometric and shader complexity has a fairly small impact on performance - even a 64x increase in scene complexity only drops performance by single digit percentages. What does start to bite is if you use more complex ray tracing features - in Quake 2 RTX only the sun lighting simulates indirect lighting and then it is heavily constrained mostly to one bounce, other light scattering is heavily constrained or absent such as bouncing off water and until a recent update it would only simulate one mirror or caustic pass - so a mirror wouldn't display a glass surface that was in the scene it was reflecting, etc. though they've now upped that to 1-2 passes.
Quake 2 had the advantage of being fairly simple to rip out existing lighting, etc. features without having to deal with lots of special casing, etc. and that it used a static form of radiosity for its lighting which meant that replacing it with ray tracing doesn't necessitate going back through every level and rebuilding them so as to look OK with the new lighting.
Hope nVidia's next gen arrives sooner rather than later so I can show off properly some of the things I've been doing with Quake 2 RTX as static screenshots don't do it justice but capturing decent footage on my GTX1070 just doesn't happen LOL and screw spending money on Turing.
