We wont see ray tracing for a while. It simply still takes too much computation power. They hooked some ungodly amount of CPUs and did ray tracing and barely got 25 FPS. So yes viewable by the human eye but I think the ungodly amount of CPUs part is were they fall short.
Not to mention the difficulty involved in multi-core programming. There have been a number of articles on the subject that amount to general programmer grousing on the subject
also:
This means a gaming computer can have less components, be more energy efficient, quieter, and probably cheaper too.
I'm not betting on any of that, I just imagine my $500 going to intel instead of nVidia and my 500 core CPU requiring that kilowatt PSU instead of my video card.
Finally:
As the ray tracing technique is completely different from the current raster technique, current games will not work with this technique and will need to be re-engineered (or ported) in order to take advantage of the new display platform.
And I think this is going to be a major barrier (look at the current DX9 vs DX10 issues).
In order to support this technology we need both a consumer willing to jump on the boat (and probably pay the high cost of being an early adopter both fiscal costs and tech support costs) and also a company willing to spend a ton of money to program two different graphical engines for every game release (or risk loosing a large chunk of their market).
/sigh, we'll see. I'll probably jump on and be an early adopter anyhow (knowing me) but I'll probably spawn a few forums threads to gripe about it
