I don’t totally agree. Techniques of “cheating” have already been implemented, but they are far from perfect. The current solutions produce a lot of graphic errors that every player takes for granted. Although you may not immediately see a move for games with ray tracing, the more games you play with ray tracing, the faster you notice a move toward games without ray tracing.
I recently played Horizons from scratch down and the things that shocked me instantly were that the reflections from the water disappear just like that, especially on the sides of the screen. This is something that affects almost every game with screen space reflections. There is also some shimmer here and there in the shadows. Among the disadvantages of shadow maps, there are several parameters of shadow maps that you must adjust in each scene to fix all of these defects. Ray tracing also has disadvantages, such as noise. But this usually does not depend on the scene and there are actually many solutions to it.
I think the biggest advantage of ray tracing is that it ultimately makes game development easier. It takes a lot of hours of work to make the reflections and shadows look good, and all of this can later be put into other things like creating more content or better animation. I say at the end because at this point the game should work fine with or without ray tracing. If you get “ray tracing only” games in the future, you really will notice the difference. This is why it is good to have ray tracing on phones and tablets, the more systems that contain ray tracing devices, the faster the game developers will switch to this technology.
