Intel converts ET: Quake Wars to ray-tracing

This is good stuff. I really hope raytracing starts taking off. Current GPUs are blazing fast at heavily pipelined rasterising, but that particular model of rendering is incredibly awkward. Most effects have to be "truncated" because every level of indirection incurs a huge cost: you can only render to texture, use the result to render to another texture, etc. so many times - the latency kills you and you're often wasting cycles repeating the same calculation over and over. Complexity increases disproportionately with every added effect.

There's been some success with getting ray tracing working on current GPUs, but it's pretty inefficient due to the architectual assumptions. A large number of simple CPU cores with their own decoding units (as opposed to GPU cores, which run in lock-step in groups) are much more convenient for ray-tracing. Intel may well be on the right track here.

I doubt nVidia has been sleeping though, and AMD are known to be working on a GPU/CPU fusion project...

It wouldn't surprise me if the next PlayStation had hardware support for ray-tracing instead of a classical CPU. Of course, we'll have to wait a while for that. Microsoft won't do it because they have too much invested in Direct3D, and Nintendo, uh... yeah. I don't think so.