More than anything, this is probably key: ...But maybe raytracing will eventually have its day.Contrary to some popular beliefs, most of the rendering work is not done to be “realistic”, but to be artistic or stylish.
Well, it's the common algorithm used by a bunch of different rendering plugins for professional 3d design: V-Ray, RenderMan, MentalRay to name a few. That day would be many, many years ago. Note that those are used for both realistic and non-realistic rendering as ray-tracers tend to give much more control over the lighting parameters than the default renderers in most packages.
Context, man! The post is about real-time raytracing, not professional 3D design.
We use a lot of software rendering (Mesa OpenGL or Manta raytracer) - and for our purposes, large models with more primitives than screen pixels - raytracing is faster (for us) for the O(pixels) rather than O(primitives). Plus, the multicore CPU handles large models better than a GPU. Of course, there are lots of caveats and different use cases (gaming is totally different from our needs). For example, we still use a lot of Mesa OpenGL anyways, just because it's easier to use most of the time than a raytracer.