It's a shame no one seems to want it since it to use ray tracing one has to re write the renderers.
that rewrite would be a piece of cake probably. I've been playing with openRL, it basically takes most of the work from you. you compose a complete scene on the driver side and then just trigger the rendering. The openRL/Caustics driver handles all the rest.
It's similar with OptiX.
yet it isn't rocket-science either to write your own tracer (I'd guess every rendering/gfx coder made at least one in their lifetime).
Only apple seems to be in a position to get devs to rewrite sw. It's a shame they don't care for it.
maybe we don't do it, because we care?
using tech for the sake of it isn't really beneficial. We are rather goal oriented: "how can you make it look twice as good with 1% more gpu usage".
e.g. you can get a nice DoF by separating the view by depth into 3 planes, do some blur passes and compose these by depth again. this isn't really correct, as you don't capture occluded objects in the far depth case. simple way to fix that would be to just render these 3 image-"layers". but we don't. why? because it would take 3 times as long (roughly) and you'd see some difference if you really really pay attention, but 99% of the players won't. now we could go one more step, with path tracing, which would cost 100time more (simply because you trace and shade 100times more samples per pixel), that would look obviously a little bit more accurate, but 99.99% of the players won't ever notice it. (but actually might complain about the noise)
the first step to get tracing would be to not rewrite the renderer completely, but to add tracing on top to achieve something beneficial. and "look no further" because that's what is already happening. nowadays we use in most games "screen space reflections" (and this is simple tracing along rays in the depth buffer) which seems to be beneficial in comparison to reflection planes/texture. e.g. the water in Ryse in the first cutscene uses a custom water shader I wrote, to achieve some things that are not really possible (in a simple way) with reflection rendering (or rasterization)
1. the water has traced subsurface scattering (which sadly is very subtle in the lighting conditions)
2. there is the player character that drops into water and swims, having very localized reflections on very rough (even bending) water waves
3. there are large scale objects like the chain, that needs distant reflection and at the same time really accurate reflection where it intersects the waves
another case where some kind of tracing is used is in 'Last of Us", where the occlusion of light by dynamic objects is 'kind of' traced. the dynamic objects are represented roughly by spheres.
POM/VirtualDisplacement/Parallax mapping is another very localized effect where rays are traced to achieve something that wasn't otherwise possible, within acceptable performance constrains.
if ImgTec would want to push tracing, they'd have to send devkits to developers, free, in big amounts.