People often bring up Japanese hand size when discussing the design of the Switch despite the near identical hand size of the average Japanese and American male. Americans think their hands are larger when they’re actually just fatter.

Ray tracing isn't necessarily about creating "realistic" scenes. It's about creating a realistic model for the behavior of light. It doesn't preclude color grading or any other stylistic flair you want to inject into a final render. Fortnite is a cartoony game that looks pretty great with raytracing. Epic's Matrix demo adopts the same "cold blue" aesthetic from the films. Disney/Pixar use path tracing in their 3D works but nobody would say "Up" or "Frozen" look "realistic", you know?

>The thing is, games have become really good at faking those things, so for a lot of people the difference is only noticeable when viewing side-by-side comparisons, and not really when actually playing in-game.

In some side by side comparisons you may not notice any difference or even an advantage to the "non-RT" image. Offline baking allows us to perform extremely high quality path traced lighting and shadowing, taking hours and hours to illuminate a scene, then store that result on disk and load it back in when the game is played. The downside is that all of the geometry we use to perform those calculations must remain static! Because you aren't able to perform those calculations at runtime you can't allow the player to modify the scene and break the lighting/shadowing you baked into it. Modern processors have made complex physical interaction very achievable but utilizing offline lighting techniques means you can't make wide-scale use of them for interactivity.

Real-time ray tracing is a massive boon, not just to visual fidelity, but to interactivity in game environments going forward. It also alleviate a lot of manual effort we spend faking the lighting in environments to look as if we did have RT available. It will be interesting when we see the first game that doesn't offer a "non-RT" version because it was built from the ground up using RT and didn't incorporate any older workflows and techniques.