That’s what game engines are for

Yea, it’s doing that. RT is getting cheaper, and PT is not really used outside of things like cyberpunk “rt overdrive” which are basically just for show.

there is an official android desktop mode, I tried it and it isn’t great ofc but my phone manufacturer (oneplus) has clearly put no work into making it functional

Honestly the biggest thing missing in general lighting is usually rough specular reflections and small scale global illumination, which are very hard to do consistently without raytracing (or huge light bakes)

Activision has a good technique for baking static light maps with rough specular reflections. It’s fairly efficient, however it’s still a lot of data. Their recent games have been in the 100-200 gb range apparently. I’m sure light bakes make up a good portion of that. It’s also not dynamic of course.

So, what I’m saying is, raytracing will help with this, hardware will advance, and everyone will get more realistic looking games hopefully.

path tracing is a paradigm shift, a completely different way of showing a scene to that normally done, it’s just a slow and expensive one (that has existed for many years but only started to become possible in real time recently due to advancing gpu hardware)

Yes, usually the improvement is minimal. That is because games are designed around rasterization and have path tracing as an afterthought. The quality of path tracing still isn’t great because a bunch of tricks are currently needed to make it run faster.

You could say the same about EVs actually, they have existed since like the 1920s but only are becoming useful for actual driving because of advancing battery technology.

There’s also other things that people probably use more often, even if they don’t know it, like apache, nginx, or ffmpeg

You could honestly count going to any website as using Linux, because like 99% of websites are hosted on linux