Comment Re:Nice scaling (Score 1) 97
If you use the simplistic style of raytracing then yes, but there are many additions which make it possible to do extremely realistic scenes.
The fundamental problem is that ray tracing is only half of the puzzle. Typically you trace from each pixel on a "screen" into the 3d scene and look at where that ray intersects with an object. You then calculate the color of the object at that point and this becomes the color of that pixel on the screen. (In a real scenario you typically calculate multiple rays per pixel.)
The problem is how you calculate the color, with simple algorithms (such at color of the surface and distance and angle to the nearest light-source) then the effect is not very realistic. But global illumination methods like photon mapping (where you basically first run a ray tracing from all light sources which "light" the scene and then run a screen ray tracing and use the data from the first run to calculate the color of pixels become a lot more advanced) or image based rendering (where you use an HDR image as a light source) can produce very good results.
There is a reason why most professional rendering is done using ray-tracing techniques. It may be slow, but if you can trade speed for quality you can get very realistic results.