There might be a good reason for this. Raster effects were already really good in newer games, and ray tracing could only improve on that high bar. It’s filling in details that are barely noticeable, but creap ever so slightly closer to photorealism.
Old games start from a low bar, so ray tracing has dramatic improvement.
What? Because texture mapping showed up much before Quake, wolfenstein 3d had it. And you didn’t need any special video card for it, it was rendered by the CPU.
Sorry, texture mapping with alpha (transparency)