Fallbacks are incredibly common. There are fall backs for Ray Tracing, for example. All of these are optimization.
Lacking this level of optimization from the start was a sham. And Alex helped let them.get away with it.
Thankfully the game flopped, Im sure in no small part to its inaccesibility on a larger range of hardware, so the devs lowered the functional requirements.
Digital Foundry puts tech demo featuresets over a reasonably designed game, every single time. Nvidia relies on these narratives to push wasteful hardware.
John and Richard are the only hosts I care about these days. Alex and Oliver have become insufferable .