I admit to not knowing much about coding or anything more about ray tracing than what NVidia's blog tells me, but isn't FDev's Cobra engine already doing something like this?
In most games, 'ray tracing' benefits appear to be 'better' action rendering. I have my doubts about this, as I've grown to really hate how most blockbuster movies model CGI fight scenes with 'realistic blur'. I am terrified that this is what the simplest Ray Tracing algorithms and AI are going to produce. My hope, of course, is that Elite: Dangerous and FDev's Cobra Engine will actually utilize Ray Tracing to make the entire process of rendering the galaxy more efficient, provided you have DXR/RTX/whatever one needs to streamline ray tracing.
I don't believe Elite terrain runs off polygons and pre-existing materials like most games, but it procedurally generates every surface material based upon its interactions with light. So whatever steps ED currently runs through before rasterizing could be dramatically altered as ray tracing is more embraced. Isn't that how it works? Whether or not 'Shadows are conventional faked now'.
Icy worlds have surfaces where light refracts and scatters to a minimal degree. I admit I'm only aware of this because my GTX 670 has even more trouble rendering icy worlds than rocky worlds.
Ages ago, back in 2014, Brookes said that the cobra engine is built capable of modeling light from multiple light sources, but that is disabled because the demands on GPUs at the time were insane.
So my hope is that implementing these new process trees for new GPUs will not be as heavy a developmental bottleneck as everyone here seems to think. Besides, FDev will be making these changes to the Cobra Engine, which will affect all of their games, so if you're worried about eating into Elite development time, that's probably not an issue, as they'll most likely be different teams.