I suppose it depends on the angle from which you view it.

Same. And I'm sick of all these stupid puddles everywhere. It's like how everything two generations ago looked wrapped in plastic because card makers were shovelling specular lightmaps or whatever.

It's just the vapid faces of fashion. A bullet point for the investors that'll impress for a moment, then be forgotten.

it's a lot more than puddles looking fancy. it's the entire lightning engine. like how real light will come in the window hit the wall, the floor, the grass outside, and you, bouncing off of all of that to difuse those colors and tones throughout the room and change as you move. that's what raytracing does. without it they just have to create different color lights sources in the room to approximate that, or just create a single color light source. raytracing is infinitely less work for the devs and is infinitely better as a light engine.

the problem is the whole industry glommed onto it before hardware could handle it.

lhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=araZUoSOPmM

I recommend this video to understand the benifits of ray tracing.