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Real Time Ray tracing is still very far off. Brigade serves as a good proof of concept, but a lot of things are yet to be researched and implemented to make it viable in commercial sphere. Seeing the progress, I do not think commercial real time ray traced game will be a reality any time soon in this decade.

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It's been "next gen" for decades. It's just a terribly inefficient brute-force approach to lighting a scene. I don't think it'll ever be viable for real-time graphics.

Even if it'd be viable, the traditional approach is much faster and easier on resources. You still want to retain a part of the GPU for physics, maybe. Or run on lower-end hardware, too. Using ray-tracing for accurate shadows or reflections in part of a scene may be viable, but I severely doubt games will just use ray-tracing for rendering. CAD and architecture stuff may benefit more from that, I guess.

It will probably need GPU's to at least slowly into ray/path tracing engines, like what Imagination is doing. I think we'll probably get there within 10 years. 100+ TeraFlops should do it.

You are probably right it seems far off now.

But I'm sure ray-traced engine is the killer-app of the Oculus Rift, and companies like Valve and Epic are aware of that gold rush. Once people see ray-tracing on VR they are not going back.

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