>>718735725
Raytracing was introduced into video games with a single purpose - to give hardware manufacturers something they could flex for the foreseeable future. Everything else has been achieved, there's nothing to impress the audience with. Meanwhile, for raytracing to work even on powerful hardware, it requires shitty hacks like DLSS and framegen, and that's three generations since its introduction. So Nvidia and AMD finally have something to "work on" for many years (other than AI, but that came later). They just needed a reason to nickel and dime you.
In reality, lighting requires as much artistry as any other part of the image, so simply enabling "realistic" lighting is not an approach that good games would be comfortable with, which becomes obvious when someone forces raytracing into games not designed for it.