The worst case would be if you were super close several statues that were all rotated differently
You can also say that's a best case, because then likely statue instances is all you see, so there is no need to to have all those other models in the background.
The real question is: How many different statues can we have? I guess it will take some time until we recognize those limitations. Maybe PS6 hype is 1TB cardridges, or data streaming becomes essential, or we get breakthroughs in compression ideas.
Now that these points are settled it's time to focus on what matters: will software rasterization substitute hardware? Is mesh shader a good alternative to Nanite?
Likely we want to see still some more examples like Dreams or UE5 until we can believe what starts to makes sense.
If we have consistent detail per pixel there is no more need for triangles, and drawing points needs no HW acceleration. Mesh shaders are obsolete as well. But i really want to extend mesh shader execution model to compute. Currently we need to make too much roundtrips over VRAM for any kind of data flow which does not fit into a single shader (which often is just a small part of a program). This really feels restricted, kinda dumb and has to be addressed. In this sense, amplification shaders stand out and raise hopes. Restricting this to 'just rasterization' feels like a missed opportunity. I'd say improvements there (and also having coarser options so GPUs can operate independent from CPU control) are more urgent than removing ROPs.
Do we expect hardware RTGI to get mature enough to be a good alternative to Lumen within UE5? Metro Exodus showed how hardware RTGI can scale from Medium to High to Ultra with impressive performance results, can the same be achieved within UE5 with time?
To me it seems both Metro and UE5 GI is 'slow', while both looks good.
Ofc. we want full RT support for UE, including Nanite detail. Because RTs biggest strength is high frequency detail. There are no alternatives which can give exact results here.
Currently, issues can be fixed. BVH build is software on all architectures, and the problem only exists on PC due to API.
However, i really hope the debate helps to understand why it is too early to implement HW builders or ray reordering. I'm afraid NV may do this soon, and then doors are probably closed. Resulting limitations are the reason there are 20 years between Messiah and UE5.