They don‘t need to delay anything to add basic ray tracing features, most current game implementations were done in a few weeks as side projects, Digital Foundry talked about this in a lot of their ray tracing videos. Ray tracing features are also now part of DirectX and Vulcan and have open SDK‘s.

Microsoft added ray tracing GI to Gears of War 5 in 2 weeks with a single engineer.

Even just something simple like ray traced contact shadows would be a massive visual upgrade that could be done in very little time without the need to change any art at all.

In general they should add new GPU features especially mesh shading, VRS, and DLSS to drastically increase performance.

When the devs said that originally there were almost no GPU‘s that supported it, now it‘s going to be the standard for AMD and Nvidia going forward as well as consoles. So there‘s a big industry shift.