wtf123isthis: I do not have the means to buy a recent graphics card.
What's so essentially different in DX12 that makes it a have-to-have?
Speaking on new GPUs:
I have played most of the current RT titles, and find most of them to be "meh." The main issue for me is that even though a person sits in front of a screen playing a game, and they know it is a video game (they can suspend reality while playing), graphical choices included with raytracing sometimes "go against" what feels correct/natural.
For example, if I am walking around in real life and I look down into a puddle of water, the reflection of whatever is in the background (like buildings) will be somewhat blurry/distorted and have a ripple/skew to them. If you look online at photography in the rain you will see what I mean. And for a long time developers have been faking these with screen space reflections that match what it would look like in real life, fairly well. Raytracing adds real reflections which looks beautiful with windows and mirrors in Cyberpunk2077, but when you look at the water puddles everywhere it stops looking natural/real. I think they screwed up every use of raytracing in this game, except for RT reflections with glass (like mirrors and windows on buildings).
With my 7700k and 3080ti I get around 70-75 FPS at 4k, almost everything maxed, and only RT reflections set to simple on. Turning off the RT reflections gave me about 10 more FPS back. I eventually just played with it off, because the water reflections look terrible. Like a perfect mirror of the surroundings. But muddy, dirty, dirt-filled water (with anything like cars, people, the wind causing vibrations) usually looks fuzzy in real life. To me the screen space reflections on the water looks far superior and of course we don't need to suffer losing FPS for it. I do wish it could be turned on just for glass surfaces though, because seeing the reflections of NPCs walking by is nice. :)
Anyways, I know you asked about DX12, but thought if you we looking at new GPUs this might help. Everyone has their own opinions, and I would say it's agood idea to include comparing youtube videos and screenshots from people playing at maxed settings with monster GPUs. Even though you may not be buying one of those you can see the currently what it might look like for you.
You also might end up preferring like me, to play with RT off. So far only Control is the only game that has "correct" raytracing. Even though I did not like that game too much (the repeating corridors and combat), RT was done well in that game! Not just to make things shiny and cool, but in a way that makse sense when you are inside the game-space. Reflections are used where it makes sense that it would, and it feels sorta "hyper realistic." I think out of that naturally comes the "oooh and aaah" we all want to whatever extent.