I believe that things will definately go the way of raytracing in time. History has taught me that each technique has a time to dominate.
I remember back to the days of Wing Commander I & II. The ships were 2D images which were rotated and scaled in real time to give the impression of 3D. There was no way that level of detail could have been done with real time polygons at that time! The same was true of the 2D perspective blocks of Dungeon Master. The fact is, with screen shots it looked fantastic, but once things were moving, it showed up the limitations of the technology.
Not long after that Ultima Underworld and Doom came along, in 'real' 3D (atually doom and Ultima Underworld used both, rasterisation for environment and 2D scaled for characters), people were just starting to see the potential in the 3D games market and GPU '3D' accelerators began their rise to world domination.
In reality, though, rasterisation is as much of an 'Effect' of 3D as was the Wing Commander I & II ships. Your models cease being 3D geometry and become 2D triangles long before you see them, hence the long held problems with transparency sorting, reflection, refraction and shadows. These all have to be simulated in some way since the stuff is no longer 3D. There are a myriad ways to do each of these, and if done well in the right scene, they each have a place and the results are impressive. on the other hand..
Raytracing is true 3D in the sense that your models stay in 3D for the entire lifetime of the render and are not 'transformed' into 2D at any point. The practical upshot of this is, with ray tracing, naturally occuring pixel perfect transparency, Reflections, Refraction and Shadowing are all very simple to create using the same technique, it's just more rays.
Where will it go? The pieces are falling into place. The march of shaders is moving GPUs to a many-core design. With tweaking this could begin to support ray tracing at increasing speeds. All it would need are hardware based acceration structures / traversal & intersection and you're heading in the right direction.
Ultimately I believe that GPUs will become a kind of scene simulator (much like lightwave / 3D Studio), where we upload geometry and information about material \ surface properties and they will be simulated both visually and physically. Using a new Scene-graph-like API, GPU manufacturers will then be able to compete on speed of rendering and realism in their simulation. Shaders could exist still as Surface Shaders, Polygon Shaders & Physics Shaders. As processors become even more powerful then new effects could be added. Global illumination effects such as Radiosity and caustic effects will begin to make their way in. Wouldn't it be great to have new effects made possible for older (RT) games just by upgrading the GPU?! If we think this is impossible, we should consider, it would have been near impossible to forsee the Geforce 8800 level of rasterisation power back in the days of Doom. It would have been possible to do Wing Commander style graphics with huge resampled images with hundreds of frames by now, but why didn't it happen? Because it was replaced by a better technology as the power came along.
It will take its' time and both will exist side by side for a long time, but the limitations of rasterisation will eventually be its undoing, just as it was for the 3D in 2D in games like Wing Commander and Dungeon Master.
I remember back to the days of Wing Commander I & II. The ships were 2D images which were rotated and scaled in real time to give the impression of 3D. There was no way that level of detail could have been done with real time polygons at that time! The same was true of the 2D perspective blocks of Dungeon Master. The fact is, with screen shots it looked fantastic, but once things were moving, it showed up the limitations of the technology.
Not long after that Ultima Underworld and Doom came along, in 'real' 3D (atually doom and Ultima Underworld used both, rasterisation for environment and 2D scaled for characters), people were just starting to see the potential in the 3D games market and GPU '3D' accelerators began their rise to world domination.
In reality, though, rasterisation is as much of an 'Effect' of 3D as was the Wing Commander I & II ships. Your models cease being 3D geometry and become 2D triangles long before you see them, hence the long held problems with transparency sorting, reflection, refraction and shadows. These all have to be simulated in some way since the stuff is no longer 3D. There are a myriad ways to do each of these, and if done well in the right scene, they each have a place and the results are impressive. on the other hand..
Raytracing is true 3D in the sense that your models stay in 3D for the entire lifetime of the render and are not 'transformed' into 2D at any point. The practical upshot of this is, with ray tracing, naturally occuring pixel perfect transparency, Reflections, Refraction and Shadowing are all very simple to create using the same technique, it's just more rays.
Where will it go? The pieces are falling into place. The march of shaders is moving GPUs to a many-core design. With tweaking this could begin to support ray tracing at increasing speeds. All it would need are hardware based acceration structures / traversal & intersection and you're heading in the right direction.
Ultimately I believe that GPUs will become a kind of scene simulator (much like lightwave / 3D Studio), where we upload geometry and information about material \ surface properties and they will be simulated both visually and physically. Using a new Scene-graph-like API, GPU manufacturers will then be able to compete on speed of rendering and realism in their simulation. Shaders could exist still as Surface Shaders, Polygon Shaders & Physics Shaders. As processors become even more powerful then new effects could be added. Global illumination effects such as Radiosity and caustic effects will begin to make their way in. Wouldn't it be great to have new effects made possible for older (RT) games just by upgrading the GPU?! If we think this is impossible, we should consider, it would have been near impossible to forsee the Geforce 8800 level of rasterisation power back in the days of Doom. It would have been possible to do Wing Commander style graphics with huge resampled images with hundreds of frames by now, but why didn't it happen? Because it was replaced by a better technology as the power came along.
It will take its' time and both will exist side by side for a long time, but the limitations of rasterisation will eventually be its undoing, just as it was for the 3D in 2D in games like Wing Commander and Dungeon Master.