Maybe the (VERY FAR) future of gaming accelerators...you decide! ::)

Q3A - Raytraced
http://www.q3rt.de/

Quake 4 - Raytraced
http://www.q4rt.de/

News Article on the Tech. behind it all...
http://www.pcper.com/article.php?aid=334

They have some DivX of it in action too... ;)

Interesting stuff! :)

rumor
Intel work on a raytracing chip

LOL! Figures... ::)

I'm kinda ignorant when it comes to raytracing, what's so great about it??

If I look at those screenshots, it's not like it's making the game look any better, or am I looking in the wrong places??

It has some definitive advantages, but most of these wouldn't make ground-breaking difference to existing OpenGL/DirectX tricks for visual effects in your typical, fast paced 3D shooter.

Lighting and Reflections would be much more realistic, but that comes obviously at a high price (performance).

IMHO, with the existing DirectX10/OpenGL2.x Hardware and the beginning Physics integration, the room for the Idea of realtime Raytracing has become alot smaller.

Back in the Quake 3 days, the advantages would have been ground-breaking, but the performance simply wan't there to realize it.
Now we begin to see the performance problem being solved more and more, but the advantages of the old days have been eaten up by the existing Rendering capabilities.

In order to get to the next higher, ground-breaking level - Raytracing needs (again) a truckload of more performance which won't see the mainstream before 2012 - at which time typical 3D Hardware will have catched up again...

@Ultima - you also have to remember that the industry on the whole adopted raterizing as it's main rendering method.

All current architectures of graphics card are based on "raster graphics" which dates back to the earliest television sets and games consoles.

The "realtime raytracing" allows (as @Falcon said) for MUCH more realistic effects such as PRECISE shadows and realistic water / reflections / transparence, etc...

However, since this is just a prototype (and may continue to be so due to the HUGE processing requirements needed) it's just a pipedream at the moment.

Time will tell if anything actually comes from all this (would be cool to see it happen though - even if they just produce a few proto-cards and maybe only a single retail model...I'd collect one just for the novelty!)