It’s what they use in movies, even in OG Toy Story, so... yea, it’s “been around for awhile”.
It’s generally very taxing for real-time rendering, that’s what’s exciting about the “RTX” tech, with it being more feasible on a greater scale than past implementations (some older games had single objects, like clouds, being ray-traced as a gimmick to say “hey, look!”).
Anyway, yea, the prices on the new cards are insane and removed all excitement for me.