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There's no reason why ray-tracing can't work with bent normals. That's how Blender's "smooth shading" works, and Blender uses raytracing for rendering.

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That is correct for Cycles, but the kind of raytracing that is possible with hardware-acceleration inside a GPU is severely restricted in comparison to a general-purpose CPU raytracer like Blender's Cycles.

I believe Eevee, the Blender GPU ray-tracer, does also currently not support having reflection rays collide with surface generated by normal/displacement operations, but instead they will approximate flight path by using the unmodified geometry.

Cycles also runs on GPUs.

But without using the ray-tracing hardware advertised in the article.

You said, "the kind of raytracing that is possible with hardware-acceleration inside a GPU is severely restricted in comparison to a general-purpose CPU raytracer like Blender's Cycles." This is manifestly incorrect.

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