Traditionally ray tracing was a technique that you'd use if you wanted to get something like photo-realism but it isn't just about photo-realism - just getting somewhat accurate and more crucially realtime light that isn't a massive hack job of baked in shadows, heavily faked up GI and dynamic shadow mapping techniques that have lots of problems and don't work on all objects in a scene, etc. would be a huge advantage as well as being able to have a unified reflection system that can properly reflect parts of the scene outside of screen space, etc.
Ray tracing itself isn't "supposed" to look one way specifically but often the goal is to render something that closely resembles realistic lighting of a scene. Full scene, full resolution ray tracing does tend to have a certain look but you don't have to have that look to have a successful ray tracing engine.
I disagree on the merit that we won't have the hardware for it in any reasonable form for some time yet. What we are seeing now is the prime definition of heavy faked up ray tracing with reflections here and there. Some refractions found in another game. And, maybe a game will use it for shadows and another with ambient occlusion. Perhaps we will see it used for global illumination. Yet it's full effect is reduce in the neighborhood of 75%-90% to increase frame rates. All of it so far has been nothing more then a hack job at best. And all of it with a simply upscale look to what rasterization offers.
And please, don't remind me of Control. It's no different as it's visuals fall flat from what I know ray tracing to look like.
What I see is a missed opportunity. One I believe AMD will fill. Take the most important aspects of how Ray tracing works, rasterize it and blend ray tracing were needed without the performance penalty we see now unless you invest $1200 for it. This is where it fails today.
Lets be honest here we won't, ever, see photo realism for ray tracing in gaming. It will always have that rasterized look to it. What we should, correction will, see is the most important aspect of why ray tracing is so enticing to developers and blend it into how games are developed today. With the option to add ray tracing in its lighter elements such as reflections, refractions, global illumination, ambient occlusion, etc. While offering developers "it just works" aspect to using it in games development.
That's were the money is IMO. Not what we are seeing now from it. IMO, it's a complete mess when you have to develop a blurring technique just to off set the performance penalty.
Edit:
Just in case anyone is wondering what I'm talking about here are a few examples below:
https://gpuopen.com/deferred-path-tracing-enscape/
https://www.redsharknews.com/produc...der-brings-real-time-ray-tracing-within-grasp