Basically RTX implementation like other games. Shadows and lighting.
Raytracing is overrated. It only requires high end hardware for no real benefit for the simmer.
DLSS would make more sense imho.
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That is not entierly true, especially when it comes to reflections: with raytracing we could get rid of the screen space reflections and their really ugly artifacts (missing reflections for world parts off screen, ugly reflections of bridges, and most important the dreadful shimmering around treelines intersecting with water) and we would get detailed reflections of the clouds…
And there is another benifit the user often overlooks: it is way easier to work with raytracing and setting up scenes as with the “hacks” needed for conventional rendering → the work for the developers gets alot easier … to be fair that is not so important for a flight sim since it usually does not have complex lighting scenes as often found in games…
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yeh, I’d like to see raytraced reflections mostly, because the screenspace reflections aren’t the best. Otherwise, I don’t really see the point in MSFS.
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Its coming to the sim later this year, or when they finally get DX12 working properly.
It depends how its implemented. Some games make better use of it than others. Considering how many people in the FS community seem obsessed with the visual look of the sim it could have a lot of benefit.
DLSS is coming too so I guess we’ll see what difference both make.
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It would improve the graphics.
There is already a “Raytracing” option in the UserCfg.opt file but I don’t think it does anything.
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GamersNexus did a video where they did blind testing of Ray Tracing with a few participants. The only people who got it right (Ray Tracing was ON versus Ray Tracing was OFF) were the people who reviewed games for a living. The Ray-Tracing workarounds that have been used for the last 25+ years have become so good that for the average gamer it is difficult to tell when Ray Tracing is actually being used.
I know that Asobo runs different teams, but it seems there are still so many more important things to do, such as acknowledge and find a fix to the infamous stutter problem.
Judicious application of it in the form of raytraced reflections would be nice. The current screen space / raymarched reflections are just not that great IMHO. But overall, the lighting in the sim is pretty good for the most part.
As much as nVidia would like to try to convince the world otherwise though, real time ray tracing is computationally expensive, and even the highest end nVidia GPUs take a significant performance hit with full ray tracing enabled in the titles that support it. Not sure that’s what the sim needs when Asobo are desperately trying to optimize things and trying to squeak out a few extra frames here and there.
IMHO, DLSS is probably a more useful technology to look forward to than RTX.
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My 40-year-old Amiga 3000 supports ray tracing. Nice to see modern graphics cards are finally catching up. 
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I highly doubt that … yes of course there was SW like Cinema 4D which had SW raytracing support, but HW - Raytracing … no way …
The point why it took so long to have the first iterations of HW accelerated ray tracing, are its intense matrix multiplications needed. A multiplikation is quite expensive in HW in terms of transistor count and even more so when multplying matrices - the older technology nodes would have needed enormous raw die sizes. Even today, HW ray tracing is not cheap on raw used die area.
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It would be very nice for VFR fliers who are looking out the windows a lot, or taking screenshots near ocean or lake boundaries. I would honestly really like this.
DLSS would be very nice too… and would help offset the cost from ray-traced reflections. Two great tastes that go great together, I hope. 
The sim would benefit from more realism in its flight, aircraft, ATC, AI and weather models and not from more eye candy. This is a flight sim, not CyberWitcher 2112.
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It would benefit from both, since both affects realism. But we don’t seem to have much say in it either way, do we? Asobo is on their own path implementing the things they want.
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True, they both affect realism but not equally. Also “both” is ideal but resources are clearly limited so most likely not a realistic scenario.
I’d be fine with Asobo/MS focusing on the core simulation but we all know that’s not how things work around here.
As Asobo themselves have pointed out there’s different teams that specialise in different things. Its not as if because they’re working on raytracing they’re not working on making the ATC better. Studio time doesn’t work like that. There’s very specific teams specialising in very specific things. People who will specialise on the graphics and lighting side of things will work on making ray tracing work.
I guess we’ll see what ray tracing is like in the sim. It is definitely coming, we know that.
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Exactly, Working Title isn’t going to be messing around implementing Ray Tracing.
I just hope that Raytracing isn’t implemented as a simple On/Off switch (all or nothing). Sort of how the terrain LOD setting affects everything from buildings to trees to textures to photogrammetry to mountains to autogen. It makes optimizing performance more difficult.
Of course it would benefit graphics but it will also need DLSS or else no computer would be able to run it. Reflections on water would make the biggest difference, shadows not so much.
I got a blender file for your Amiga, we’ll hear back from you in a decade when the Amiga finishes the render. In fact, your Amiga could never finish the render as you will run out of memory well before 10% of the render is loaded.
There are those people who want to disparage modern technology stating that Nvidia has done nothing new. But, the reality is that real-time ray tracing while playing a video game at 60+ fps and 4K was simply not a thing until the RTX series of graphics cards. Sure you have the kindergarten level let’s pretend to call it ray tracing reshade. Because it meets a very limited definition of what is ray tracing the not-so-fast Nvidia people clamored to it. But, from a perspective of approaching honest to goodness ray tracing it is as far a cry from Ray Tracing as a paint by numbers is to truly creative artwork.
Whatever rabbit hole you want to stick your head down is fine, but don’t expect those who know what dedicated hardware-based ray tracing truly is to fall for drinking your brand of Flavor Aid.