Thanks for your reply here Juan!
All I need to be happy for now is raytraced shadows and raytraced AO, working with all engine features (including foliage and VR) with good performance. Reflections and GI are heavy, and in my opinion it wouldn’t be bad if you guys at Epic would focus most of the work on getting all engine features to work perfectly with RT shadows and AO, because those are the things that are quite close to performance of CSM and SSAO, while being vastly superior in quality. I already spend like 35% of my games frame budget on CSM, moving that to RT shadows is something that might even be faster in some cases.
I’m obviously excited about things like reflections and GI too, but I don’t anticipate shipping a game with those in the near future. Shadows and AO is in theory very much usable now already, once things like HISMC performance and VR support have been worked on in the engine. I hope (and I’m optimistic) that 4.24 will be an engine version where replacing CSM with RT shadows (on Turing GPUs) will make sense both from a quality and performance perspective in a foliage-heavy VR game.