I agree with you about this. Sadly this means there will be a hard switch in the technology, given how certain UE4 features aren’t really up to par compared to how they look with Raytracing (worst offender would be interior+exterior lighting IMO, aka. the terrible skylight when going indoors. SSR probably coming second place, even though we have the [really unoptimized] planar reflections).
The result is that any game made with the full Raytracing lighting capabilities in mind will look really bad without the RTX featureset. So instead of RTX becoming a nice enhancement for those that have it, it will punish users that don’t have it.
and since the technology is already here, it’s obvious that Epic will not spend time improving such base non-RTX features for this intermediate time until RTX has full adoption. As a result, I can see that non-RTX graphical features will be pretty much stalled from now on