This is well illustrated by a comparison with The Witcher 3. CD Projekt RED's game, released 11 years ago, demonstrates a clearer image in motion. The Witcher 3 has less noise, no aggressive "image doubling" or "flickering," and no weak, low-resolution shadows – problems associated with noise suppression in ray tracing.
At the same time, The Witcher 3 is inferior in terms of scene scale and the number of objects, but it wins in image stability even indoors, where Crimson Desert shows noticeable drops in lighting quality.
The reason lies in the developers' approach: Crimson Desert is built around ray tracing from scratch, like some other modern engines.
The game looks best with ray tracing reconstruction enabled, but this reduces performance by about 40%. At the same time, native resolution without upscaling remains optimal, which is not available to many players on consoles and low-end PCs.
The Witcher 3, however, today benefits from its art style, color palette, and overall visual stability. CD Projekt RED's game has stood the test of time and still competes with new AAA projects.