While by no means undermining the work of the artist.
Such images are always deceptive, not only from the performance standpoint and the scans used but by how the light would interact with other elements OTHER than just vegetation in an open outdoor areas in a real game or even a cut scene, such as characters in the scene, fur, hair, self shadowing on those vs the environment, reflections in water, indoor scenes, animations and interactivity with surrounding elements.
We went through this in some of our projects and i can tell you how “simple and easy” it is to achieve a “photoreal” result with bunch of scans thrown in and a few typical lights, just watch a 30 mins youtube tutorial these days and you get a similar result. But as soon as you start putting it all together to be functional and make it work as a complete image from an artistic perspective (not even mentioning performance) you start seeing how its not going to work so easily.
Especially when characters are thrown in, complex characters with hair skin cloth sims and moving parts.
As for Raytracing it would be a dream come true from an artistic perspective for me, as my team and I got tired of playing around with all these endless problems in UE when it comes to self reflections, shadows and lighting. It’s so much needless work to get every shot right in a cut scene let alone a game to look on par with personal quality expectations and a certain standard compared to what we are used to in offline renderers.
But as much as I would love to have raytracing running today in realtime and everywhere, I know as i mentioned above that this is just an early PR stunt and not a realistic expectation anytime soon. Best thing not to get excited over this and to make do with what we have as tools for now.