Nvidia claims real time ray tracing now possible

At GDC, Nvidia and Microsoft made a joint announcement about the possibility of doing real time ray tracing, something the CG community has striven for since ray tracing was popularized by Turner Whitted in 1979. Whitted did it on big computers at Bell Labs, just before the PC was introduced. Since then, scores of papers and books have been written about ray tracing. And although the basic ray tracing equation is eloquently straight forward, because of the density of rays (originating and reflected) in a given image it takes an enormous amount of computing power to render a scene. As