Ray Tracing is usally seen in 3D professionnal pictures, 3D movies, etc. to make more realistic light. Use it in real time and... Yeah, you've got high-end cinematic video games!
Not today. But soon. The demo that you can see in this post was rendered at 24IPS@1080p with Unreal Engine. Not bad... But it's on a $60 000 rendering computer (4 x Tesla V100 GPU).
ILMxLAB (who made the demo) said about these two videos:
"Next-generation rendering features shown in today’s demo include:
- Textured area lights
- Ray-traced area light shadows
- Ray-traced reflections
- Ray-traced ambient occlusion
- Cinematic depth of field (DOF)
- NVIDIA GameWorks ray tracing denoising"
I can't wait to have video games like this. When? In two years? Five years? I don't know. :(