RTX does not have rigid quality levels. Indeed, Battlefield V interviews show pretty similar customization options and performance scaling choices. The guys working on Unreal Engine also went through similar process.
I have a feeling you have a bit incorrect understanding of what RTX is or does. The only part of RTX relevant here is RT Cores. What RT Cores deal with is ray tracing itself, casting rays and calculating intersections. That is it. Optimizations like preparing the structures, setting up materials/surfaces and even placing rays are generic and have little to do with RT Cores.
What CryEngine guys are showing and talking about shows the progress of effects and solutions used. CryEngine does lighting and reflections with voxels (SVOGI). Voxels have been researched and used in other methods as well like VXAO or VXGI (in this case, both from Nvidia). The way how the voxel data structures are built and handled puts them halfway towards ray-tracing in principle. Voxels are simpler to handle and less accurate but are also much faster to work with - performance hit is considerable compared to more common methods (like SSAO or HBAO in case of ambient occlusion) but compared to raytracing it is very fast.
In case of this demo, this ends up being very nice for CryEngine - their cutoff from RT is not a clearly visible cutoff but fallback to their existing voxel-based solution. It is not as accurate but when used creatively - looks like this was used for example in reflections on rougher concrete in this case - it is good enough. Both DICE and Epic have said that semi-reflective surfaces are more complex to handle with RT so not doing RT on these is a performance benefit. I wonder if this is something they can automate to a certain degree in the engine.
