Games

if I can get a solid 60fps with ray-traced reflections, I'll take that over 144. Reflections and shadows do a lot for me

I don't really either. Once it gets fast enough it'll be common, but we can do really good approximations right now.

The thing that really hurts HL2 in terms of looking less dated is the old low-poly BSP geometry. Modern games and engines use landscapes and models because they can do it fast enough now. But I don't think Source can handle that level of detail.

Same here and with the price of GPUs, raytracing is expensive as hell for the wallet and it's straight up not a good value.

In general, I agree, but I think you underestimate the benifits it provides. While ray-tracing doesn't add much to more static or simple scenes, it can make a huge difference with more complex or dynamic scenes. Half Life 2 is honestly probably the ideal game to demonstrate this due to its heavy reliance on physics. Current lighting and reflection systems, for all their advancements and advantages, struggle to convincingly handle objects moving in the scene and interacting with each other. Add in a flickering torch or similar and things tend to go even further off the rails. This is why in a lot of games, interactive objects end up standing out in an otherwise well-rendered enviroment. Good raytracing fixes this and can go a really long way to creating a unified, but dynamic look to an enviroment. All that is just on the player's side too, theres even more boons for developers.

That said, I still don't plan to be playing many RTX or ray-traced games any time soon. As you said, its still a nightmare performance wise, and I personally start getting motion sick at the framerates it runs at. Once hardware catches up more seriously, I think it will be a really useful tool.

Better visuals and much faster/cheaper for the developer to make.

We are still in the infancy of the technology and the vast majority of games with ray tracing doesn't fully utilise it as they must compromise to support normal raster, leading to half baked implementations on engines not designed with ray tracing in mind.

I tried out Portal RTX, found the room where the light ball is casting shadows all around. It looked nice; but I also felt like I’ve seen the same effect imitated with regular rendering. Sure there might be slight differences, but I wouldn’t have spotted them.

I'm right there with you. I'm happy if a game can maintain a solid 60hz.

IMHO it was a nice, but not worldbreaking gimmick, that was overhyped to sell. Like polygons count, like antialias, like monitor refresh rate... things that of course have their utility but over the years have been the target of marketing.