Real-Time Ray Tracing Demo
An anecdotal observation: there seem to be many ray tracing-related articles and ShowHNs that make the  front page. For someone who isn't in the computer graphics space, what's the importance of improving existing ray tracers or the novelty in writing one's own? Is writing one a particularly challenging thing to do? Is improving existing ray tracers the equivalent of chip manufacturers increasing CPU performance in the chip world? Just trying to understand this a bit better.