It’s probably not that much faster than or efficient than traditional rasterization, but ray-tracing gets exponentially more expensive to absolutely completely fill in the scene. For the RT scenario it actually does make sense. Even rendering out frames and animations in blender you don’t let the renderer go on forever. At some point it’s more effective to let it stop and denoise it. The earlier you can get away with doing that the better.
I feel like the revelation to gaming studios is not that people like a good product, it’s that Larian was allowed to make one without investors demanding it be the shittiest thing since shit sandwiches.