I've been saying for some time that the biggest reason ray tracing looks lackluster is because it's being held back by games needing to support rasterization. We've mastered rasterization which means any scene you can rasterize will look almost identical to a ray traced scene. And you don't see scenes where ray tracing would blow your mind because those scenes most likely can't be rasterized, which means they don't added to the game. So for the end user ray tracing looks kinda meh because you don't really get any significant benefits and the marginal differences between ray traced and rasterized scenes are not worth the performance cost.

It's like having a 3D engine but you can only use it for 2D games.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 day ago

you perfectly nailed the reason i don't even use rtx. the side by sides just arent good enough, in the actual games. I can't justify the additional performance hit when i literally cannot tell the difference in reflections when swapping between the two on a real gameplay setting. sure it looks different, but better? more often than not, no. obviously this all varies in degree game to game depending how it was designed. Hogwarts Legacy rtx DID look better, but it wasnt enough to justify it. the baked scenes were great looking too.