The new Minecraft stuff is the very first time I've seen raytracing produce graphics that make my brain conceive this could be a "realistically lit" scene, and it doesn't even take advantage of things like significant amounts of reflection and re-reflection. HOWEVER, I see zero benefit to the actual game from that.

In the case of Minecraft no new graphics feature is really going to benefit the "actual game", but players who obsess over their created spaces might really appreciate having better lighting that they can control through things like reflectivity. It's something you'd have to poll the average teen-who-still-plays-Minecraft about though.

Have you tried the many advanced shader packs that've been available for years and don't need raytracing?

https://youtu.be/JJeb1eEZYhI

If you haven't seen any screenshots of it at work in Remedy's Control, it's pretty nice there. Nothing groundbreaking but it's the first time I went 'oh!' and realized that I was seeing stuff that would've been invisible without raytracing. It's used for shadowing, reflections on glass, and a bunch of other stuff that ties the scene together and ensures things are where you expect them to be.

I expect we'll see some more compelling uses of it in the next few years, given that it took until the last year or so to see games start using it in a way that wasn't just tacked on. (It makes sense that Control was one of the first titles to use it extensively, since they were publishing talks about GPU raytracing well before the hardware was in anyone's hands)

We're in an awkward transition period where hardware raytracing is now available but not very useful for most people as the hardware is still niche and getting the most incredible results from it doesn't run at 60+ fps. But, if we ever want games/VR/AR/etc. to match the photorealism of modern visual effects, full-blown raytracing / path tracing will be required. It's going to take a while but it will eventually happen. The results will look far different than the before/after screenshots in the Turing paper.

Also, once the hardware is more ubiquitous (e.g. in consoles), some of the features provided by raytracing will make the game development process much simpler even if the results are only marginally better for some of the presented hybrid use cases.