Cyberpunk is a good example of gorgeous raytracing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3pkuU0cGQu8

The problem is that proper raytracing is way too heavy for most machines, so game devs don't bother. The Cyberpunk example on max graphics would need an RTX 4090 just to run it over 60fps. No point in pushing tech that nobody can run yet.

Raytracing on older games looks great because they already weren't intensive to run, so developers can get away with maximizing raytracing while still running fine.

It's just because newer games have too much to effectively ray trace, so they have to use it in a very limited manner. There are very few games fully ray traced.

Ray traced quake looks more like real video than a lot of those modern games do; it just looks like some kind of theme park/old theater costume type of deal with a lot of rubber because the materials aren't as good.

I feel like gamedevs and game publishers are more excited about raytracing than consumers, because it would allow them to throw out the entire range of ~~smokes and mirrors~~ tricks currently used for simulating lighting. Which makes the code simpler and cheaper to implement.

Raytracing is really the more obvious way of implementing complex lighting, it's just always been out of reach performance-wise.
Well, it still is. Games still use those same tricks and then only mild raytracing on top for the finishing touches.

Raytracing is still very computationally intensive, and doesn't have enough market penetration to make sense on most modern games. Devs need to implement two solutions: a raytraced path and a raster path. The game needs to be fully playable in both, across a wide range on hardware. The largest install base for most games is still console, where RT barely exists. So RT is generally relegated to eye candy for high-end PC. Which makes it a marketing feature, not a game feature.

It'll be interesting to see if that changes with the PS5 Pro. I expect we'll see more first-party titles support it, but not much else until the next real console generation.

I'm an old gamedev and for me the goal of ray tracing was always photo realism.

Raster shaders can get you toon shading, enough photo realism, funky effects and so on.

I prefer going to the myseum and looking at impressionist art than photos.

But that's maybe just me.

I think the tech industry misses the good old days when the upgrade was noticable and exciting. Now it's just this big media blitz and the upgrades are not that noticeable. Lol, nothin like watching a 30 minute video that they flip back and forth with. "Oh, I can see the difference"

Imo it has less to do with photorealism vs non-photorealism and more to do with pbr (physically based rendering) vs non-pbr. The former attempts to recreate photorealistic graphics by adding additional texture maps (typically metallic/smooth or specular/roughness) to allow for things ranging from glossiness and reflectivity, to refraction and sub-surface scattering. The result is that PBR materials tend to have little to no noticeable difference between PBR enabled renderers so long as they share the same maps.

Non-pbr renderers, however, tend to be more inaccurate and tend to have visual quirks or "signatures". For an example, to me everything made in UE3 tends to have a weird plastic-y look to it, while metals in Skyrim tend to look like foam cosplay weapons. These games can significantly benefit from raytracing because it'd involve replacing the non-pbr renderer with a PBR renderer, resulting in a significant upgrade in visual quality by itself. Throw in raytracing and you get beautiful shadows, speculars, reflections, and so on in a game previously incapable of it.

A couple newer games have raytracing that genuinely adds detail but it’s pretty subtle and you have to look for it. Cyberpunk 2077 is a good example.

Portal and Minecraft are particularly good examples of raytracing because of how their sandbox aspects let you play with it.

There absolutely is a factor that modern graphics are so even without ray tracing is doesn’t add a whole lot. I still think Destiny 2 is one of the best looking games I’ve played and it uses fairly “old” graphics technology. The reason it looks good is their artists do a good job.

Teardown has wonderful raytracing but again they're not going for photo realism

Quake was also the first game with texture mapping. At the time, it was fucking amazing, and how, today, modern games can have things like transparency and round corners on polygons on their 3-D models.

Also, when it came out, only, like, two video cards even supported all of the features in the game. It was almost a year before any other video cards came out that did. There was one ATI Radeon card and one Nvidia card. I remember that I had the ATI card that supported the Ray tracing and the texture mapping (Radeon 9800).

I think Gothic 3 had a realistic lightning mod, but they had to cheat because the company made the buildings so they looked good with the original lightning.

So, yeah, does not always work.

Quake II RTX is still probably the best graphics I’ve seen. In its own way.

To be fair, those old games have been rewritten in newer engines in order to support ray tracing, and at that point you could apply other modern global illumination methods and get almost the same effect with less performance cost.

The thing that makes raytracing so attractive, though, is how extremely easy ray tracing is to implement. Unless I'm copy-pasting others' finished work, I can make raytracing work over the weekend with Vulkan or DirectX shaders as opposed to having to implement 10-15 other shaders for the same effect over half a year of development.

I totally agree. Quake GL improved quake 100 fold. RT quake did the same all over again