Is not realtime. You could find an article on raytracing and code something in a weekend. Granted, POV-Ray is vastly more complex than a toy raytracer, but it is not realtime. It takes minutes to hours to render a single frame.
"Computers have been around for years, punch-card mainframes have been great at universities for decades even."
NVidia are, currently, the only vendor who have dedicated silicon for it (AMD have demonstrated DXRT working with existing silicon).
Real-time just means that they’re doing it faster. NVidia has their own implementation. But ray tracing isn’t an NVidia technology, and NVidia implementing it in silicon is no reason for everyone else to sit around and say “well I guess we have to do it NVidia’s way now”.
