Can you see it now?

No, not yet. What's true isn't flamebait. It's like saying that the PS3 has more polygons than the Wii.

^ it does >_o

I don't even know what this 'raytracing' thing is. But frankly, reading over everything, it seems like it has something to do with lighting and the quality of the games overall graphics. Personally speaking, I'd rather graphic designers worked on making character movement more fluid and enhancing interaction between 'background' and interactive objects. In the last 2 gens, it seems graphic designers have been more interested in finding an all purpose filter or 'lighting effect' or bloom, etc that will mask a games otherwise flawed graphics.

But obviously I'm not a graphic designer so this raytracing thing may be an entirely new format that does wonders to stuff I was mentioning.

No, you're rather saying that because the Ps3 has more polygons than the Wii, it is a superior product.

I really doubt there will be a fully raytraced game in 2012... unless it's a game with really simple graphics.

I've read about ray tracing, seen videos of it on youtube, saw message boards about it and I still not getting what it is about and what so impressive about it.

It's an image rendering technique which works by tracing an independent ray of light for each pixel in the rendered image. This ray can realistically bounce off (or shine through) all kinds of materials and light sources, which results in very realistic lighting and material effects when done right.

You can see some impressive examples of raytraced images here:

http://hof.povray.org/

For example:

While Ray-Tracing is in many ways superior to the raster-scan line algorithm that most computer graphics are based upon, "Stand-Alone" ray-tracing is an outdated technique that hasn't been used to produce high-end 3D graphics for over a decade; and I suspect that for the first several years of Ray-Traced games a conventional raster-scan line based engine will probably still produce more "Realistic" looking games. When hardware becomes powerful enough to handle as much geometry and lighting as an artist desires while ray-tracing a scene the raster scan line algorithm will (probably) fully be outdated.

so if I understood ray-tracing correctly, in the glaces picture, the diffraction of the background objects is due to this and not some remodeling? So that means that the virtual materials have the exact same (or close) light reflecting and refracting attributes as their real counterparts?
a telescope in ray-tracing would actually work and not just zoom in? (in theory)