You make some good points, but culling doesn’t really work for complex on-screen geometry like foliage, hair, volumetics, crowds, etc, and games are pushing in

You make some good points, but culling doesn’t really work for complex on-screen geometry like foliage, hair, volumetics, crowds, etc, and games are pushing in those directions. Raster is currently cheaper for well tuned video game assets, that is true, but is not cheaper for film quality assets, and that’s where games want to go in the future. Filtering is a very important issue, and you’re right that more polys is not automatically better from a quality standpoint. Still, ray tracing can enable rendering of geometric complexity that is not possible with raster in real time, as long as you have a way to filter. Games aren’t yet really pushing on the boundaries of instancing, but they will down the road. The other appeal with ray tracing is being able to consolidate all the various tricks and algorithms into a single path tracing framework. Ray tracing architectures don’t need deferred shading (though they may choose a similar wavefront approach), and they don’t have a collection of difficult and separate ad-hoc methods for each effect they want (shadows, AO, reflections, indirect lighting, volumetrics, etc. etc.). Ray tracing gives you a unified framework where getting new lighting effects is easier to add, generally speaking.