The problem with radically different approaches is that GPU hardware is optimized for a specific set of techniques. Unless a new technique can work well with current GPUs, it has small chances of being adopted.
Solving the problem at all is so hard that the first person to do it will become famous, and then the industry will follow. It's analogous to the Wright brothers inventing the airplane: back then, people could fly, but the industry was based around using balloons and gliders.
It's fair to say that a solution that can't be parallelized might not be deployed to real-time simulations like video games for quite a long time, but Hollywood will definitely use it.
> The last ten years have seen a dramatic shift in this balance, and path tracing techniques are now widely used. This shift was partially fueled by steadily increasing computational power and memory, but also by significant improvements in sampling, rendering, and denoising techniques. In this survey, we provide an overview of path tracing and highlight important milestones in its development that have led to it becoming the preferred movie rendering technique today.
So when you get wowed by the next new film's stunning level of realism, you can reflect on how soon path finding might find its way into high-end gaming rigs too ;)
Right; what I'm pointing out is that your comment isn't saying "if only we could raytrace in WebGL, we would have better graphics". It's saying "both raytracing and forward rendering (and so on) have problems, and we need new techniques entirely if we want to model reality accurately".
