Why wait when you can pay a premium for hardware that supports DXR right now? I mean, according to JHH and NVIDIA you're nuts if you aren't jumping on the RTX bandwagon to play some Minecraft @ 30fps
/blatant sarcasm
I actually think this is kinda the total opposite, they're trying to fast-track support of this to up its utilization (although their end game is to increase Vulkan support and use), since DXR will run on non-RTX and non-specialized ray-tracing hardware. I think this potentially means, when paired with them working to make Vulkan usable as a HAL, that ray-tracing support could be backported to older stuff easier too (but that might just be my lack of real knowledge of this stuff).
Seems to me they're making a play at becoming the default target API, by making it so that you can port in your DX stuff (from DX9, to DX12 and DXR). Which Vulkan already outstrips DX12 on platforms its supported on, and this would effectively make it so that you could work just in Vulkan. And you could do so if you're updating an older game/engine or if you want to target say both the Playstation and Xbox (I think this is one of the primary areas they're targeting, hoping that say Epic/Unreal, Unity, etc, might build their game engines targeting Vulkan, and then make it so they can easily port that work to DX implementations so they could port games to Xbox and Windows easily; and I think there's implications in that it means you could take older game/engine and code for it using Vulkan while it translates from the older DX/OpenGL, so it could help in porting older games to newer platforms; plus if this works decently, that would massively boost Linux as a gaming platform).
They're just making sure that they won't get left behind due to DXR/ray-tracing. I think the bigger deal is the HAL stuff though, but it also ties in, in that you should be able to get it working on both (multiple platforms, from Xbox, Windows, Playstation, and Android; I'm not sure about Apple's stuff but perhaps they can add Metal to their HAL support in the future?) while focusing on one API for development.
I might also be reading way too much into this, and real world performance would be the key (i.e. doesn't matter if you offer HAL is the performance is so bad that no one would really want to use it), but to me this reads as a major play to remove a lot of the issues with Linux gaming. Even if the performance isn't stupendous, it should still enable a lot of older games to be a lot more viable on Linux platforms, as well as make it so that developers can work in Vulkan but port their stuff to DX easier.
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