I'm glad that Carmack spoke out on ray-tracing for real-time. More precisely against the approach that Intel as been semi-officially following.
Shooting at triangle soups with cosmic rays is hardly efficient.
Predictably, Carmack has mentioned a possible evolution from 3D worlds made of very many unique texels to 3D worlds made of very many unique texels in 3D space.. basically voxels in sparse matrices (using run length compression for hollow spaces inside objects (assuming that one doesn't want to render actual solids 8)).

Using voxels (in sparse matrices) is definitely attractive, but the transition from 2D textures isn't so straightforward. Good resolution textures are only efficient because of mip-mapping. Mip-mapping is largely based on a static pre-process (creating smaller resolution copies of a texture).
When animating a model, one easily moves vertices that define polygons, while the heavy details are in textures that are based on static mip-maps.
If polygons go away, and there are only voxels (fat points) available, one would still need to do subsampling somehow, depending on the size of an object.. or else aliasing artifacts and terrible cache trashing would become major problems.

Anyway, today (Saturday) I went to work and I started writing a software renderer.. nothing new, and very very basic so far (one point per vertex !), but it's a good time to start, especially now with that I have a better understanding of hardware shaders.

..I think I agree on software renderers having a future, but I'll write more on that later.

zzzzzzzzzzz

My employer has been involving me more and more with 3D technology development for the company. Very nice indeed !!
From time to time, I get involved with very interesting technology previews. What I see is not what I can report of. Also early preview of things don't normally tell the whole story. However, it seems that programmability is coming back in a big way.
This is somewhat obvious, considering how programmable shaders are getting constantly more powerful and pervasive. Also, with the PS3 almost going Cell-only, with nVidia releasing CUDA and with the academical world wishing for more GPGPU.

With great programmability comes great uncertainty: what's next ?  read more »