It's been "next gen" for decades. It's just a terribly inefficient brute-force approach to lighting a scene. I don't think it'll ever be viable for real-time graphics.
Even if it'd be viable, the traditional approach is much faster and easier on resources. You still want to retain a part of the GPU for physics, maybe. Or run on lower-end hardware, too. Using ray-tracing for accurate shadows or reflections in part of a scene may be viable, but I severely doubt games will just use ray-tracing for rendering. CAD and architecture stuff may benefit more from that, I guess.
It will probably need GPU's to at least slowly into ray/path tracing engines, like what Imagination is doing. I think we'll probably get there within 10 years. 100+ TeraFlops should do it.
ygra|11 years ago
higherpurpose|11 years ago