I dunno m8, if u look at other items within a pc, and the timescales elapsed, they still work on a basis of banging as many hertz over a piece of aged technology fundamentally, using more and more power - rather than a new technology that uses the same or less power.
All market driven of course. I mean even tho there can be processors and techniques that use less power and better instruction sets, the public will less likely buy them coz u can`t use Word on it.
It`s a key marker that the size of the psu vS speed of pcs is going up hand in hand. Sure they`re making tiny advances along the way - oooo mmx technology and etc..
Raytracing has been around for something like 15 years, I can remember an Amiga package that would let u do it at home. It`s taken this long to come up with what summounts to a library of instructions that on the face of it "will replace the raster" - which inherently is very innefficient. U`r crt & tft internally use a rasterline to draw one pixel height across the width of the screen, then is added the modulous, then another line is drawn. What this is intending to do in to Data->RayLibrary->Raster, and opposed to Data->Raster that exists atm.
Unless there are a new batch of monitors coming out that don`t rely on rasterscans to produce a picture, u`r introducing an instruction set into the process where there wasn`t one b4. All the Data->RayLibrary stuff is generally done in the software houses b4 the product is burnt to CD/DVD for u`r use at home, so that all u have to worry about is Data->Raster.
However inefficient, it does give an edge to the quality of the proposed picture. If u think about something as simple as CSS, all the graphical movements are preproduced for the user in the software house, so u`r outputs during the game are fixed, - large amounts, but inherently fixed. This proposes to let u`r pc do the work, which will result in a more fluid looking end result, with probably limitless combinations - as long as u have a powerfull enough pc to do the work, or a card I guess. Like a Physics card. More power, gimme some more watts!
Nice money spinner. I can see it coming to a console prehaps.