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.
Yeah, for sure. Raytracing is very computationally intensive. It doesn’t make sense to do full-scene raytracing unless you have hardware that’s specifically designed for it. It works for something like quake since none of the scenes are particularly complex, but obviously you don’t hit anything close to the same framerates as you would with raster rendering.