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Ray tracing is a rendering technique that’s hovered just over the horizon for decades. It was boosted to prominence (and tremendous controversy) when Intel announced Larrabee in 2007 and proclaimed that the chip would deliver a digital Holy Grail — real-time ray tracing (RTRT) at playable framerates in modern games. Much was written. AMD and Nvidia actually agreed on something for the first time in living memory and publicly denounced the idea (at Nvision 2008, one analyst declared that Larrabee was “like a GPU from 2006.” When Intel announced that it was canceling Larrabee and refocusing the project on HPC workloads, ray tracing faded back in the shadows.