sawiemander

Nvidia's Optix is built on top of their general purpose library, CUDA and it massively accelerates ray casts. People have been using this for gpu accelerates path tracers.

http://heart-touching-graphics.blogspot.com/2012/02/bidirect...

I went to the Ikea Vray talk at Siggraph. They are reusing CAD models but the key to photorealistic rendering is not the model but the materials. They use a capture and calibration process to feed textures into their VRay based shaders in 3DS Max.