Speaking of upscaling. I'm hardly a graphics expert, but what if we apply the upscaler not to the frame, but to a texture - namely, a lightmap?
Raytrace at low resolution relatively cheaply, give the resulting lightmap to the upscaler, and tell it to work its magic, et voila, we get a decently raytraced lightmap for peanuts compared to full-scale raytracing.
You can even fill in some gaps with frame generation when the lightmap changes, lowering the frequency at which you have to fully raytrace.