Game development is about maximizing revenue while minimizing development costs. There won’t be many more Mysts, Dooms, Quakes or Half Life 2s in the gaming future. Get ready for “Generative AI” stories/levels and ever increasing hardware feature set requirements.
Game engines don’t have to simulate sound pressure waves bouncing off surfaces to get good audio. They don’t have to simulate all the atoms in objects to get good physics. There’s no reason to have to simulate photons to get good lighting. This is a way to lower dev costs and increase spending on the consumer side, I would not be surprised if Nvidia was incentivizing publishers to use ray tracing.
Titanfall 2 is 9 years old and looks pretty damned good compared to recent releases. The biggest jump I have seen in graphics was HL:Alyx and a lot of that was VR letting you press your eyeballs up against the windows to see the sweaty hand prints.
There is plenty of room for publishers improve without leaning on new hardware features.