Achieving "photorealistic" results via rasterization requires a lot of dirty tricks and slight of hand. Supporting it requires a lot of (expensive) hard work f

Achieving "photorealistic" results via rasterization requires a lot of dirty tricks and slight of hand. Supporting it requires a lot of (expensive) hard work from graphics programmers and content artists. The content pipeline is relatively simple for ray-traced content: just define the material properties of the surfaces of your scene, and the transport properties of the media your light is flowing through, and the light bounces where it bounces. The limiting factor for real-time graphics applications is generally the cost of content creation. Real-time ray tracing could mitigate that cost.