To see how far rasterization has been stretched, and how that holds back development - Path of Exile 2 has a tech talk about their bare minimum settings. Artists weren't allowed to rely on anything that could be turned off. They begged the programmers for specific gimmicks, and turned that cheap nonsense into a million blades of grass, raymarched cracks in translucent ice, and soft shadows with no Peter Panning.

Or, picking one specific trick: ambient occlusion was half of why Crysis humbled $5,000 PCs. There's a slide deck for how a superior version of the same effect was achieved in Toy Story 3 on the Wii.

Real-time raytracing was unobtanium for decades because we kept moving the goalposts. The entire 3D games industry is built on cheating around simple parallel techniques being too expensive. By the time hardware catches up to where doing something the simple way is feasible, complex software has faked a wild variety of other effects. Meanwhile: games are designed to rely on what's available. All of the tells for proper path-traced lighting have either been faked or avoided. Games don't even do mirrors, anymore.

There's a reason RTX shows off games from the late 1900s.