PowerVR demo real time ray tracing graphics at 1280 × 720, 30fps.

[Pottsey]

That is the point, back in the early 90s when there was so much "zomg ray tracing" hype it was precisely because it wasn't subtle. The current graphics vs pictures of scenes rendered in ray tracing was entirely NOT subtle because those games had terrible lighting. People thought you know, CGI level ray traced scenes vs Fade to Black type graphics and wet themselves over the idea of playing games that looked that much better than games of the time. That idea still persists and the way Pottsey talks about ray tracing in games is as if the difference will be playing Super Mario Bros vs playing a game version of Terminator 2.

If you could magically make ray tracing in real time for games work in 95, it would be a massive difference but so would using current rendering methods playing Crysis compared to those games.

Today ray tracing isn't some magic bullet that will bring us photorealistic games over night, the differences will be subtle, where games without it but with better artwork/design will look better than less good games using poor design but lighting via ray tracing.

In a way ray tracing is a magic bullet that will bring us photorealistic games assuming we are talking about a platform with a high penetration of ray tracing hardware. Ray Tracing lets you do photorealistic lights and shadows in a fraction of the development time and at a fraction of the money cost of rasterized only rendering.

Lights and shadows is too basic a description. Reflections, Refractions, Ambient Occlusion, Global Illumination, Accurate Transparency all have a noticeable improvement in quality and more importantly are automatically done for very little work and with a speed increase over rasterized rendering.

In the PowerVR demo you can turn ray tracing on and off. As soon as you switch on ray tracing the cars suddenly becomes photorealistic with perfect transparency; accurate shadows and the life like reflections are amazing in motion. Everything has automatic shadows from every light source, high quality shadows and more. Look at the cars in all the different ray tracing demos they are a massive step forward in photorealistic graphics.
http://blog.imgtec.com/wp-content/u...es_PowerVR-Ray-Tracing-hybrid-rendering-1.jpg

One major benefit of Ray tracing is you no longer suffer from resolution artifacts in shadows while gaining a good performance boost. If only you could see those videos in real life, they are so much better than the poor quality handhold camera recording.

It’s not just about better quality graphics. It’s about speeding up game development and lowering costs. It also means small or single person teams can suddenly do Reflections, Refractions, Ambient Occlusion, Global Illumination, Accurate Transparency without spending lots of money or time implanting those features.

There are lots of other benefits as well one such example is the impact ray tracing could have on augmented reality and the blending in of real and computer generated objects.