If you haven't taken a gander at it yet, you may want to take a look at OpenRT and projects using OpenRT such as Quake3 Raytraced. Also take a look at the hardware architecture as well.

Ray-tracing presents a much more detailed rendering of a scene, but was always considerably slower than rasterization. If hardware-accelerated ray-tracing architecture grows in the market, you may see your skyline beautifully rendered in real-time .. with traffic, crowds, etc.