> For the foreseeable future, games will still need to look good without fully path traced lighting.
And in 7-10 years when the software stack is matured, we'll be thanking ourselves for doing this in hardware the right way. I don't understand why planning for the future is considered so wasteful - this is an architecture Apple can re-use for future hardware and scale to larger GPUs. Maybe it doesn't make sense for Macs today, but in 5 years that may no longer be the case. Now people don't have to throw away a perfectly good computer made in these twilight years of Moore's law.
For non-games applications like Blender or Cinema4D, having hardware-accelerated ray tracing and denoising is already a game-changer. Instead of switching between preview and render layers, you can interact with a production-quality render in real time. Materials are properly emissive and transmissive, PBR and normal maps composite naturally instead of needing different settings, and you can count the time it takes before getting an acceptable frame in milliseconds, not minutes.
I don't often give Apple the benefit of the doubt, but hardware-accelerated ray tracing is a no-brainer here. If they aren't going to abandon Metal, and they intend to maintain their minuscule foothold in PC gaming, they have to lay the groundwork for future titles to get developed on. They have the hardware investment, they have the capital to invest in their software, and their competitors like Khronos (apparently) and Microsoft both had ray tracing APIs for years when Apple finally released theirs.