I think pairing RX 5700 XT with Control as the "defining game" is an interesting choice, considering the facts 1. AMD cards were incapable of RT at the time and 2. Control was basically the first game with a good, comprehensive RT implementation that had a massive positive impact on the graphics.

> massive positive impacts on graphics

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).