The big news is a standardized API to do realtime raytracing. Both of those are a big deal because as you said everyone until now wrote their own and had to ove

The big news is a standardized API to do realtime raytracing. Both of those are a big deal because as you said everyone until now wrote their own and had to overcome the challenges associated with that. If that's taken care of (for the most part), the only things left to write as a developer are how you want to use this feature. In TFA, it's using it to do realtime raytraced reflections where previous techniques to do that in realtime are too much of an approximation and have big drawbacks.