PC Perspective has just published an article that looks at the development taking place at Intel in the area of real-time raytracing for the rendering of games.

All of this leads us to one thought: we want this now. Unfortunately, that's not quite possible as the hardware isn't fast enough to get high resolution and high frame rates at the same time. But it turns out we aren't far from that convergence. The team at Intel estimates that within 2 years or so, the hardware will exist that will allow "game quality" ray tracing on a desktop machine. That means that in that timeframe we might see a fully raytraced game engine (though probably from a team like one at Intel).

Real-time raytracing for PC games almost a reality