Ray tracing is not a fad though, and reducing it to just reflections is ignorant. Reflections, shadows, bounce lighting/global illumination, etc. all get noticeable bumps in quality. They are definitely more subtle than previous bumps from new techniques because those old techniques have gotten so damn good. But at the same time, those previous techniques have reached their limits and have unfixable problems. Whether that is occlusion artifacts in reflections, light leaking from global illumination, non-interactive baked lighting, shadows with uncanny resolution and no penumbra, hacky ambient occlusion, etc. etc… the problems are all minor, sure, but they are there, noticable, and devs want to keep pushing.
And this is ignoring the benefits on the dev side as well. No more annoying rasterized light placement. And pulling your hair out trying to hack the engine to get the look youre after. “It just works” is an unfortunate comment but holds a lot of truth. Even non realistic looking games will use more and more ray tracing as time goes on because of that. And eventually every device and card will have performance for a full suite of effects. Its an inevitability, not a fad.
The consoles are typically FSR2 upscaling from 1440p or lower. Plenty of games are down around 720p. Lets not pretend theyre doing 4k native on AAA titles. The pro isnt going to be native either, we need to see games and PSSR in action to see where it falls vs FSR, XESS, DLSS, and see what gpu is closest in performance. You can get a used RTX 3080 for 350-400 and i’ll be pleasantly surprised if PS5 Pro beats that level of performance.