I'm not saying that they are, just that the two technologies are intimately intertwined, and you can't really consider the impact of one without also considering the impact of the other.
Well, if the question is, "would DLSS be making waves if it wasn't complimented so well by the advent of real-time raytracing"... then let's imagine a world just like ours, where nvidia never figured out real-time raytracing, and DLSS stands on its own.
Hypothetically, do you imagine that DLSS isn't as notable in that world?
A novel new upscaling technique that significantly enhances the performance, efficiency, and longevity of any hardware that supports it, without significantly degrading image quality.
I think the PC gamers and PC gaming outlets of that world would still be talking about it, a lot. I think the console gamers of that world are still jazzed about new upscaling techniques that could blow open the doors of what console hardware is capable of over time. Switch owners of that world are definitely still dreaming of a successor handheld powered by new nvidia hardware which leverages DLSS to produce high-fidelity results.
Raytracing is a solid showcase for the extent to which DLSS enables hardware to punch above its weight, but DLSS is used to achieve many different ends. That DLSS grants enough extra headroom to counteract raytracing's performance cost is a notable application, but far from the only noteworthy one.
I mean, shit... TAA is in damn near every AAA game these days, and as great as TAA is... at resolutions that aren't 4K or near, you'll usually be left with a blurred or softened image, unless you take advantage of downsampling, or use a sharpening filter. Downsampling modern games for cleaner image quality would often have been a non-starter for me and my 1080p 144hz screen and 2070 S, at least without dropping settings or sacrificing framerate - but DLSS lets me do just that, and the results typically look fantastic, noticeably cleaner than native-res at equivalent settings without DLSS.
That's one common application of DLSS, but it shares an important commonality with
all of DLSS's other gaming-related applications - that it's enabled by the enhancement to performance and headroom that DLSS provides. That's where the impact is, when you're finally in a game, and you throw on DLSS, and suddenly you've got all these extra
frames you can
use - or you're looking forward to playing an upcoming game, with settings and res/framerate dialed higher than you'd have previously thought possible with your setup. Raytracing is an obvious thing to spend that headroom toward, and an obvious way to show people just how much performance potential DLSS can free up... but this is PC gaming we're talking about. Boosting framerate, or keeping framerate with boosted settings, or raising resolution, etc. etc... it's all on the table, and all of it is compelling stuff to PC gamers, in relatively equal measure.
If anything... in terms of impact on the industry overall, raytracing has gained much more from DLSS, than DLSS has gained from raytracing. It wasn't long ago, at all, that people generally regarded raytracing as something that wasn't presently worth the massive performance tradeoff that it incurred. Even people who were truly hyped for what raytracing was capable of, still regarded raytracing as tech that sat just beyond the horizon, a novelty which might as well only exist for those privileged or lucky enough to drop hundreds or thousands of dollars on the most bleeding-edge hardware. Now, raytracing is a viable option for quite a few more users - and developers - because of DLSS... and so is 4K gaming. And so is 144hz and beyond. And so is max settings. And so is 4K-capable handheld gaming. And so is a launch GeForce 2060, in 2021 and beyond.
And, like... that's just DLSS, and just gaming, to boot. AI image upscaling in general carries a lot of potential across a wide range of devices and applications, and we'll see that more and more over the next couple of years and decades. It's hard for me to see raytracing as something so integral to DLSS's perception, when nvidia has always presented DLSS first and foremost as a means by which to gain performance and headroom, which can then be used for whatever you want. That's some compelling stuff no matter how you slice it. Like, with or without raytracing to bolster it, AI upscaling would sell itself. Its core function (higher performance with minimal cost to image quality) is so attractive and so useful for gaming, that it's extremely easy to imagine AI upscaling growing into a ubiquitous technology present in every future gaming device on its own merit.
