Oh I more than understand it for certain effects, we could easily have a burst of rays happen, not a large amount, maybe 100, and have them go straight out the flashlight, and have them single bounce on the wall and hit something else, this could then have the lighting calculated from that, and also have a lazy effect to the gi, so it lingers. again with my example, you are in low lighting and are dealing with bounce light from a flashlight, when you are in darkness and you move, you don't have instant visibility, so the ghosting effect the gi would have here could be use for the benefit of the effect.
look, I fully understand the implications of realtime ray tracing, but we are being fed fucking reflections that tank fps to sub 30fps at 1080p from what use to be 144, the shit is not ready
what I want to see is a bake + real time approach, where things near you are real time, and things far away are baked till you get close, and when you get away from them they rebake.
we hit a wall with most effects in games, polly count... resistance 1 and 2 on ps3 are a good example of this, the poly count doubled from 1 to 2, but no one noticed at all, sure we can add more polys to certain things like a round barrel, and we notice that, but most objects, we don't. now tessellate the hell out of something when you get wall licking distance, and it just does not matter.
however going from ps1 to ps2 was night and day, ps2 to ps3 was again night and day, ps3 to 4 however, while it was a big jump, it was more resolution than actual effects that make game stand out, and with 4k, we honestly hit a point where more resolution won't effect how it looks, textures are already there, you only see pixels when you wall lick anymore, but lighting is the area that everything lives and dies on, and the only way to go forward is to ray trace as we already bake it, the only thing left is to have real time interact with baked or possibly real time too.
