Would absolutely pay up if I could get realtime raytracing for Fusion360 (Industrial/Mechanical Design software). Waiting for renders to bake only to find out that the lighting needs to be adjusted slightly can be frustratingly slow.
Even on slow computers you will get a real time photorealistic result. You will have to wait long before all noise is gone but you will notice lighting problems in a sec.
My guess is that it's one of the features Autodesk doesn't want to put in Fusion360 so they retain a market for the more expensive Inventor.
That said, I think Fusion shows you a really low resolution image in real time, if I remember correctly.
The only examples I have where real-time raytracing is used are demoscene productions where shapes are defined using simple mathematical primitives. (see the 4k intros "absolute territory" and "zetsubo", both from prismbeings for example).
Maya+Vray spits out a preview within seconds on my machine.
Fusion has some sort of simpler preview, my guess is that its some closed form lighting solver and in certain contexts it can look ok but for photorealism of a scene, its nowhere close.
I see a decent number of suggestions that people have really fast renders but I'm suspicious that we are talking about very different things.
Here is what I am typically rendering:
-Full screen on a 15" retina MBP
-Ray Traced
-In additional to the product, whole rooms/scenes that contextualize including 3D textured woods, books with Decals that are wrapped, elements of various opacity/transmissiveness, objects with some luminance, etc.
- Some objects with very high numbers of points (there is a technical name I'm forgetting), but essentially, circles render with enough polygons to not appear as a collection of lots of small/slightly noticeable line segments