How far away are we from having real time ray-tracing graphics in our games?

I wasn't that impressed when I saw the first demo movie before, but now after downloading the complete 52 minute developer walkthrough, I am very impressed with the technology here.

I suspect we are going to see a lot of future games built on this technology. Very slick and if they deliver on the real ease of delivering multi-platform they have a big win.

Would this type of engine be more likely to require huge amounts of video memory?

time for another viddy card. gf 8900 out yet?

Re-post of what I said in the shortbread:

If id can deliver on what they are promising with id Tech 5, I think epic might be in for a rude awakening. They are building what essentially ammounts to a plug and play game engine where you slap in your models, textures, levels and game specific scripting programming, and you've got a complete game. Up until now, you'd get the source and modify the engine to fit your specific game. Doesn't seem like Carmack is doing that this time 'round. Props to them for seeing the light and trying to capitalize.

Looks nice, although the face expressions still seem a bit 'flat' like in Doom 3.