Tim mentioned several times that the overall presentation is better with RT enabled. This wasn’t some crucifixion of RT
Context matters here. On it's own the video is fine, but it's a part of a long HU campaign to demonize RT using bad logic and arbitrary standards. Three videos already received heavy criticism for their flawed methodology. It's hard to pretend this last fourth video is done with benign intentions.
I play lots of COD BO6, it has zero ray tracing, yet it noisy as hell at native resolution.
In other games, screen space reflections is often very noisy, ghosty, aliased and unstable. Screen space shadows are the same. Screen space ambient occlusion is also noisy and has halo rings artifacts. Screen space global illumination is noisy too and unstable, software Lumen is noisy and has lots of boiling artifacts, non RT global illumination misses entire objects and areas, with a galore of light leaks and "glowing" objects.
Raster shadows are often jagged, low res, unstable and flicker a lot, especially when shadowing small geometry, most of the time they miss small details and geometry entirely.
He talks about laggy effect? how about a shoutout to all the raster reflections and shadows running at 1/3 or 1/4 the frame rates? These things are so common in gaming I can't believe he never found a single instant of them in his testing.
So his supposed claim of "enjoying games with artifact free presentation" is already bogus as he is intentionally hiding all most of the artifacts of the non RT path. Most of the screen space effects in current games are too reliant on TAA accumulation to bother presenting a supposed clean image.
In the end it comes down to raster being full of missing effects but with noise/flicker/laggy artifacts, or ray tracing with present and enhanced effects but with more or less noisy artifacts. It's that simple.
If he disabled Film Grain effects in many of these RT games, many of his noise problems would disappear. I tested that myself in Cyberpunk 2077 Path Tracing. In Hogwarts Legacy, he can easily use a mod that scales ray tracing resolution above Ultra (this is possible in many games already). In Star Wars Outlaws he is not using the max "Outlaw" settings, so his reflections are still not the highest quality possible from the game.
Notice how the video sometimes had to go to "300% zoom" just to make the problems noticeable. The noise that bothered his so much is often in screen elements that are small to be even noticed without a large zoom, certainly much smaller than entire effects disappearing out of screen space. In Metro Exodus he mentioned very rare examples of noise not even worth mentioning. It's little things like that that shows his argument and logic are being used in a bad faith.
If HU is fair, I expect them to release a video titled Graphics has a flicker/instability problem. But they won't even bother. They are milking the process of selling negativity around ray tracing to their already "primed" audience.
