My brother and I upgraded our computers recently. I went with bang for buck and got a 6600XT, he wanted the RT experience and got a 4070TI. Playing cyberpunk on his computer was disappointing tbh. I expected more from almost a 400% more expensive setup.
Just tells you how many tricks have been developed to make rasterization look as good as it does. Fascinating, really. It's always interesting to see how people work around a limitation.
The thing with real-time raytracing and pathtracing is that instead of being a workaround, it removes the limitation entirely, which is damn cool.
Just need faster hardware still, which will take at least another decade with how Nvidia keeps milking the smallest improvements gen after gen.
This tracks with every other graphic option if the person doesn't know exactly what they're looking for, in my experience. Most options don't have such a huge impact, and are more just "yeah, that feels a bit better, I guess" once you get past the basic, obvious stuff like resolution.