Raytracing will oneday make 3d card's and their shortcuts as obsolete as the GUS sound card, remember those?  Back in the Intel 486 days it took a lot of power to process raw sound files (ex: WAV files).  So the GUS offered an onboard processor to do the sound calculation and it was huge in the demo scene.  But then what happened?  Intel invented the Pentium, and a P1-100mhz could process raw audio 7x faster than a 486DX4-100mhz.  So of course this lead to a quick death to onboard sound processing.  In a way onboard sound processing has come back, but only in the form of 3d audio processing, but with quad core processors on the market, their death will happen next, especially with 3d sound lacking good standards, maybe DirectX 10 will change that.

Anyways, I always assumed oneday this would happened to 3d cards, I mean it was only a matter of time that we'd have so much CPU power, that 3d rendering can be done on the CPU.  We're still a long way away.  And with this article I can give you a good estimate when.

Now let's break it down, I put this in Excel and you can see it below.

As you can see, following Moore's Law, where computer power doubles every 18 months (so for simplicity we'll quadrouple speed every 3yrs), this means computers will have the power to play raytrace games in 2020, only 13yrs from now.  Now 1600x1200 seems pretty reasonable now, but 20yrs from now, it's way more likely we'll all be using 6400x4800.  Oh, and let's not forget all you'll be playing is Quake 3, with low res textures and simple polygon characters.