The past few years (2018 with the introduction of RT and upscaling reconstruction seems as good a milestone as any) feel like a transition period we're not out of yet, similar to the tail end of the DX9/Playstation3/Xbox360 era when some studios were moving to 64bit and DX11 as optional modes, almost like PC was their prototyping platform for when they made completed the jump with PS4/Xbox one and more mature PC implementations. It wouldn't surprise me if it takes more years and titles built targeting the next generation consoles before it's all settled.
I understand the reason for moving to real time ray-tracing. It is much easier for development, and apparently the data for baked/pre-rendered lighting in these big open worlds was getting out of hand. Especially with multiple time-of-day passes.
But, it is only the "path tracing" that top end Nvidia GPUs can do that matches baked lighting detail.
The standard ray-tracing in the latest Doom for instance has a very limited number of entities that actually emit light in a scene. I guess there is the main global illumination source, but many of the extra lighting details in the scene don't emit light. This is a step backward compared to baked lighting.
Even shots from the plasma weapon don't cast any light into the scene with the standard ray-tracing, which Quake 3 was doing.
And... they don't need to. Most of the most played video games on PC are all years old [0]. They're online multiplayer games that are optimized for average spec computers (and mobile) to capture as big a chunk of the potential market as possible.
It's flexing for clout, nothing else to it. And yet, I can't say it's anything new, people have been bragging, boasting and comparing their graphics cards for decades.
[0] https://activeplayer.io/top-15-most-popular-pc-games-of-2022...