Looks pretty dialed there for sure. Love how the ray traced stuff all looks so accurately lit and natural. Check out the reflections too...

That Quadro Plex they are running that on probably costs, what, like $15,000-20,000?!?

That's pretty cool, but why don't they do this kind of stuff with sound? We need sound cards that calculate the way the sound of a gunshot bounces off the 3D structure of the room you are in, or the nearby buildings or something like that.

This is "barely" ray traced - three bounces is no where near what you need for good looking ray tracing. The shadows are hard, there's no inter-reflections - I could go on. Unless you are going to really have alot of rays (30+ to 300+s) you're not going to get to cinema quality and you're just really cutting corners to meet those fps performance claims. Nice try.

OMG on the fourth pic that shows the reflections on the right side of the car door there's a nude woman sitting in the area right under the mirror

Now take a look at all the pictures again, but this time drop 4 hits of LSD, then tell me what you see. You only see what your mind interprets... By the way I see pixelization on the door of the 4th pic.

Daniel Pohl showed an 8 core box where he was bouncing the rays until the color changed by less than a certain percentage. He was getting 60fps at something like 1024x1024, maybe a little higher. This implies what has been shown time and again that GPU's don't get great performance with raytracing despite their insace floating point power. The best raytracing power has been on Cell processors, however, since they are a hybrid and have just about the perfect setup for raytracing.

Intels new "GPU" they are creating is basically 48 simpler CPU cores with 4 concurrent threads and 4 Floating point units each. I believe it was designed to do raytracing well, and can do current rasterizing techniques as well. Nvidia and AMD need to design chips like this or the cell. We really do have the technology to do raytracing on PC hardware now, it's just a matter of putting the right hardware together.

Neither CPUs or GPUs are suited for ray tracing - it's not a compute problem - it's a memory bandwidth problem. As the ray scatter and bounce around the scene all the shader programs that need to run don't have the data on cache, so they have to fetch it and there's not enough bandwidth to do that, so the compute is underutilized. All these Intel and Nvidia demos constrain the amount of ray bounces so that they don't become memory bound - but because of that they're not really ray tracing. We already have plenty of compute in CPUs and GPUs, but that's not going to make ray tracing possible for gaming unless the problem is looked at differently.

yeah when graphics engines and hardware get to this point on a normal basis we'll be in for something until you get a job making six figures a year and I'm talking more than 100000 especially after this presidential election because the tax rate will go up rofl and it gets dwon to a mere 1000 dollar video cards the graphics industry (talking about gameing developement) won't touch it or until they actually get dual triple graphics cards working to at least a 75% ratio and you can afford two decent graphics cards that can do it for less than 1500 this is a pipe dream for now although I wish it was'nt true.

The problem with the nvidia devices for raytracing is that they dont cope with random memory access patterns very well - usually incur a 600 cycle latency on a global memory fetch. Not exactly conducive for ray tracing where you need to access scene object data in a largely random pattern.
I agree with andyzee: to progress with ray-tracing as a viable rendering alternative we need to rethink the whole way raytracing is implemented or optimize the acceleration structures in such a way to suit nvidia hardware.
For the quality of image you get I really think it is worth doing.