I've been running the worst gaming set up I can get away with, which atm is a 3080 10gb, using random DDR3 ram, a budget WD 512gb ssd, and an i5 of the same socket as the i7-4790k that doesn't even support hyperthreading and can't do more than 4 tasks in parallel.

It's absolutely laughable at this point, but I'm unironically looking for a deal on that cpu lmao, it would be a huge upgrade.

I remember the main noticeable difference being ray traced reflections. However that was mostly on immovable objects in extremely simple scenes (office building). Old techniques could've gotten 90% there using cubemaps, screen space reflections, and/or rasterized overlays for dynamic objects like player characters. Or maybe just completely rasterize them, since the scenes are so simple and everything is flat surfaces with right angles anyways. Might've looked better even because you don't get issues with shaders written for a rasterized world on objects that are reflected.

Games that heavily advertise raytracing typically don't use traditional techniques properly at all, making it seem like a bigger graphical jump than it really is. You're not comparing to a real baseline.

Overall that was pretty much the poorest way to advertise the new tech. It's much more impressive in situations where traditional techniques struggle (such as reflections in situations with no right angles or irregular surfaces).

About a decade ago, I discovered that the HD 530 iGPU included with my budget-oriented i3-6300 CPU was better-performing than the physically-impressive SLI pair of 9800GTs I had been using, at something like 1/10th the power consumption.

(It didn't do PhysX, but nobody cared.)