Some time in the future wee can do real time path tracing for a few megapixels (per eye if stereo), in under 5ms, and THEN we you might think we could stop usin

Some time in the future wee can do real time path tracing for a few megapixels (per eye if stereo), in under 5ms, and THEN we you might think we could stop using smoke and mirrors for games. But even then, someone will think "if I just use some smoke and mirrors I can quite easily get twice the performance, and those spare resources I can use for better AI/larger worlds/whatever". Ray tracing (and physically based rendering in general) already simplifies things. Content creators can use "natural" parameters for material/lights, and you don't need to insert fake lights to achieve realistic shadows, dynamic lights. That's in a way "simplifying" things, but in the end it just gives more realistic games for the same or higher effort. Until everyone can use ray tracing, it'll also add another layer of complexity becauuse you need to make a separate path for ray tracing, so level editors and content creators need to ensure everything looks good both in both cases.