There's improvement in tech - check out the Unreal Engine's tech demos for example - but that doesn't really translate into visible end results because one, modern hardware can't handle all the bells and whistles, and two, when you're playing it all just blends into the background, and composition/art direction trumps details and fidelity every day of the week.

That said, the tech isn't wasted, it's also used in film graphics and animations and the like. And photo mode, where games can open up all the registers because framerate isn't as important then.

But yeah. Unreal tech demos, or if you have a PS5, there's a free tech demo called The Matrix Awakens that showcases advancements from a few years ago (heck it's been 4 years already).

We are well into the diminishing returns era now. It not done via better art designs, now you have to push significantly significantly harder to get improved results via brute forcing it.

I am very cautiously optimistic about this. It seems there has been a lot of tooling change over to integrate ray/path tracing into systems.

Once this becomes a little more ubiquitous we might start to see some decent stuff but so far it has been 7-8 years since the first ray tracing hardware came along and it is still far from implemented consistently.