Isn't that just sophistry? Whilst I agree on financials, that has nothing to do with the differences between a "tacked on" versus a "next gen/proper" implementation.
Are our definitions the same here, I wonder? I'm looking at it from a technical/development perspective only. If what you consider as "next gen/proper" is an implementation that only requires h/w ray-tracing (ie. just as we all need gpus with gpgpu compute), then even that should only be an issue when that particular game doesn't have the usual fall-back rasterization/compute method for what their solving with ray-tracing (unlikely, save for an in-house engine maybe?), or simple toggle. Otherwise, if it's not technical but rather in terms of the narrative/gameplay (eg. story event relies on reflection of something beyond screen-space, dynamic diffuse indirect illumination controlling 'feel' of full environment, or maybe even non-graphics related use case) itself forcing ray-tracing as a baseline, then sure (I don't think any of those examples are possible considering perf of the new consoles, so it likely won't translate to pc - maybe I'm not creative enough in my thinking though).
This makes no sense to me. Is there an example of a case where a hybrid-RT implementation would have been better off "turned off" in favour of the standard raster/compute approach? Mind you, I suppose "better" is pretty subjective here. I have a background in engine development, so I'm biased towards putting these seemingly small advances high up on a pedestal, where most consumers wouldn't... and that's understandable.
Sure, there will be differences between all engines. However, for the most part it's not too much of a stretch to assume most engines have rendering pipelines that lend themselves to dropping in ray-traced implementations without too much hassle (I define "hassle" here as a few programmers a few weeks to months, without having to change much existing code - depends on RT method. 'Justice' from 'Netease' is an example of this). Things like RT shadows, specular indirect, diffuse indirect, and ambient occlusion, are already handled in a pretty standardised way where inputs and outputs don't force swathing changes to be made. Over the years most game engine renderers follow similar design trajectories to each other due to knowledge sharing and openness in research. That helps in the sense that proposed hybrid-RT approaches have implementation requirements that end up somewhat satisfied already, making adoption easier.
That goes without saying. Justify your efforts using comparisons to the ground truth weighted against the performance cost and controllability. That's literally half of the job and implicit in everything a real-time graphics engineer does.
