We still don't have real time ray-tracing. Even the demos that only use ray-tracing are throwing the strict minimum of rays and they apply a series of complex filters (using machine learning) to remove the artifacts and the noise.
Both Renderman and Hyperion have denoisers that Pixar and Disney use on feature films.
> And because we could not afford to render images to convergence, we needed to develop a robust denoising solution
> The denoiser is used on most production shots, and is run automatically unless disabled
https://www.yiningkarlli.com/projects/hyperiondesign/hyperio...
(The fact that Hyperion uses a denoiser does not mean that it isn't rendering via path tracing. Similarly, the fact that real-time rendering uses a denoiser does not mean it isn't rendering via path tracing. dealing with noise is the name of the game, and machine learning isn't somehow "out of bounds")
The RTX cards dedicate something like 30% of the silicon and power "budget" to neural-nets.
This isn't something designed to appease only the ML crowd, it's used for gaming. The graphics you see is 30% ML noise reduction and upscaling.
I used to think of "AI accelerators" as some sort of gimmick, one-trick ponies like Apple's face recognition. Useful for a handful of apps, a few seconds at a time.
But no, in the RTX series of cards, the "AI stuff" is drawing nearly 100 watts and doing real work, making ray tracing viable and making 1080p look better than 4K.
I assume by the end of the century we will end up with some kind of physically based rendering at a near photonic level of detail.