There might be a good reason for this. Raster effects were already really good in newer games, and ray tracing could only improve on that high bar. It’s filling in details that are barely noticeable, but creap ever so slightly closer to photorealism.
Old games start from a low bar, so ray tracing has dramatic improvement.
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.
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.
Teardown has wonderful raytracing but again they’re not going for photo realism
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.
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 expect it to change with the next gen consoles at best ( ps6, xbox whatewer tf ). Beacuse with them we might finally be able to see the games that just straight up abandon traditional rasterization and go full ray tracing only ( also the last strugglers on pc will probably finally abandon gpus without raytracing support by that time, pepole tend to complain on consoles for ‘slowing down progress’ but dont see the absolutely ancient devices most or to be precise significant minority of gamers use ). For now even with ps5 pro they still need to create ps5 version.
