I don’t even know if I should reply to this, because I think that none of the arguments I present to you, will change your predetermined opinion. However, you are mixing shortcomings of specific raytracing implementations with the general technology, which makes no sense. None of the shortcomings you list are inherent to raytracing itself.
I chuckled at "accurate", that's a nice way to put "heavily denoised 'something' produced using a very limited number of rays".
The noisy pictures you show are from a talk about denoisers, of course these will show heavy noises in the raw result. This is the whole point of the talk. Yet, I would argue that even this denoised image has more accurate penumbras than your average rasterized approximation. Also your example is for a directional light source were a shadow mapped approximation works quite well – I was specifically talking about point and area light sources.
Off-screen objects do not "exists" on scenes to improve performance. One could use rasterization hacks to emulate that too.
I would really like to know how this hack would work, in order to get reflections of off-screen objects on a large moving object, like the cars in the GT trailer. Just a rough outline is enough.
Think about the very fact that people are arguing if the demoed effect was RT or raster.
Apparently, this is because the people that are arguing whether this was raytracing or not, do not know what raytracing actually is. I did not see a single technical person arguing about this. You could argue if the shown effects artistically look better or worse then they would have on PS4, but technically I don’t think it is up for debate.
So what do we have at the end of the day? A promising technology that could one day let game developers to develop cool effects with much smaller effort.
No, at the end of the day we have a promising technology that can already be used for effects that would not be possible otherwise. We would not be seeing these effects in the first wave of games, if this wasn’t the case.
PS
Should I mention "realtime" next to "RT" to make it sound cooler? What about rasterization, should it be mentioned it is "realtime" too? Just asking.
I rarely try to make technical discussions sound cool, I am more focused on the content.. but anyways: I used it to specifically distinguish the current form of raytracing we can use in realtime applications as opposed to offline rendering. Because in offline rendering raytracing is already the holy grail of rendering.