linuxmemes

Half the reason why I bought an RTX GPU was for the video enhancement features like SDR to HDR conversion and AI upscaling

Neither of those things have anything to do with raytracing. Well the tensor cores used for denoising in RT workloads are suitable for all kinds of AI workloads and thus also upscaling, but really it hasn't got to do anything with raytracing. Or AI in particular any GPU can do convolutions.

I don't own an nvidia card and honestly few linux users do because their driver support sucks, I'd say if nvidia advertised those features and their linux drivers don't have them your complaints should be directed at nvidia. They won't care.

Meanwhile, mpv does inverse tone mapping natively. They don't integrate AI upscaling but there's various projects providing glsl shaders which mpv can use, here's the configs for Anime4K. There's also frame interpolation around somewhere but I haven't used it in ages because variable refresh rate is the best solution to odd frame rates.

Development of X halted, the few patches that are still landing concern xwayland, don't expect anything to happen there. KDE 6.0 ships with experimental HDR support on wayland, you might not need to wait five years go give a live USB stick a spin. Arch wiki has some pointers (not that I'd be recommending arch but I am recommending their wiki).