Everything is low resolution in games. Textures, shadows, LOD, AO and reflections. Then there's the low draw-distances for these effects.
Not agree, modern textures are up to 4K and any resolution limitations are visible only up close to the objects and if these object are large, while 99% of time during gameplay we don't stare at walls so that texels would be apparent.
There are also materials in modern games. Materials usually contain several normal, roughness and albedo maps - base textures for macro and detailed tiled textures for micro scale, so with materials you don't need bake in all micro details into 8K textures to get good detalizations up close to large objects.
Also, glossy materials, brushed and polished metals, paints and other materials have reflections on them and these reflections also add up to the detalization.
And the last, but not least, usually people don't stare at walls right in front of them, so texel density shortcomings are visible only in corner cases and avg scene's texel to pixel density with modern hi-res textures will always be close to 1 to 1 for the majority of screen area.
As for shadow maps, they suffer from the same mapping problem as all other textures, another reason to ged rid of them altogether since even VSM can't provide the 1 to 1 mapping in many cases (not speaking of tons of other limitations).
Such effects as shadows, AO, etc will always have better detalization when these effects done either in screen space or in world space via RT.
Far Cry 6's ray-traced sun shadows at least don't have the huge nasty shadow-mapping artefacts that are commonly seen when shadows are cast over long distances.
They are hybrid most likely and the sad part is that they are quarter res so they don't provide the 1 to 1 mapping either and the final image appears lower res as if it would have been with higher res options.
It seems you don't play games a lot because 1080p to 4K upscaling artifacts are quite noticeable for all effects be it particles, screen space or RT effects.
When blended in with high res lighting and textures, these low res effects create appearance of lower resolution due to how the spatial upsampling works (even depth aware).
There are many tricks to get rid of the low res look - checkerboarding with temporal accumulation in output resolution for example, but I have not seen these in FC6 or RE VIII.
Aside from the low res edges, reflections, shadows, and other artifacts due to upscaling, effects can't scale infinitely low in resolution since it would make glossy reflections, indirect shadows, AO, etc way less distinguishable and stable.
First Crysis Remastered is a shit show of laziness. CPU bottlenecks galore, made worse by turning on ray tracing.
That's just remasters, not remakes. Crysis 1 remaster is built on an outdated codebase with all related single threaded limitations, that's not a devs' fault.
It would be great if Metro Exodus:Enhanced Edition's "comprehensive" approach to ray tracing inspired devs to do ground-up ray tracing and work out how to scale it down to the consoles.
UE5 already does the same with lighting - it ditches lightmaps and swaps them to Lumen (this is one of the most praised things in UE5), which can use both HW and SW ray tracing. I can imagine in a few iterations they can simply switch to fully HW RT as HW RT is far more versitile (works not just for static).
But materials is the other side of the coin and sophisticated materials hurt ray traced performance a ton more.
Materials are usually simplified for RT. Metro for one doesn't even keep texture's UVs in BVH, 1 per object color is used for color bounce.
Maybe the next console generation (and not the "~2023 pro" refresh) will put us on track.
We are already on track. Most popular game engines already support BVH and RT, even the most graphically impressive first party console exclusives have impressive RT implementations and new games with RT appear every month.
