You never mentioned the version of DirectX for tests without ray tracing. The new update looks exactly the same on maxed settings with ray tracing turned off on DirectX 11 and 12, but DX11 performs way better. That's because CDPR implemented DX12 using library d3d11on12, and because of that, DX12 version uses only one core of your CPU. If you want ray tracing, play with DX12, if not, play with DX11.
Although the flagship role-playing game has been around for several years now, the developers did not miss the opportunity to add various new (graphical) features in the course of the patches. We tested several desktop and notebook GPUs with the current version - including RT benchmarks.