Ray tracing is actually the exact opposite of the way light in the real world works. In the real world light starts at light sources, bounces off objects, and ends in your eye. Ray tracing starts at the "eye". The one thing that ray tracing does well is model reflections, but as it turns out that's not that hard of a problem and easily approximated with many other techniques. More so, it's not even remotely the dominant problem in photorealistic rendering, as reflections are often not the dominant part of any particular scene. In some ways the radiosity technique has a better claim to mimicing "the real world" but that's sort of beside the point, any rendering model is going to be an empirical approximation and not an attempt at photon simulation.
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Ray tracing is actually the exact opposite of the way light in the real world works. In the real world light starts at light sources, bounces off objects, and ends in your eye. Ray tracing starts at the "eye". The one thing that ray tracing does well is model reflections, but as it turns out that's not that hard of a problem and easily approximated with many other techniques. More so, it's not even remotely the dominant problem in photorealistic rendering, as reflections are often not the dominant part of any particular scene. In some ways the radiosity technique has a better claim to mimicing "the real world" but that's sort of beside the point, any rendering model is going to be an empirical approximation and not an attempt at photon simulation.
Ray tracing also makes parallelism easier, and for certain kinds of renders (e.g: spheres) can be as accurate as possible with less memory use.
Do you have some example renderings of reflection techniques that look as good as ray tracing in complex scenery?
For example, take a look at these renders:
http://hof.povray.org/images/ChristmasBaubles.jpg
http://hof.povray.org/glasses.html
Do you think these methods of approximation could reach that kind of quality?
nice to see POVRAY alive and kicking, beautiful images by the way.