can those images be compressed worse?

probably

http://i26.tinypic.com/x0yxjd.jpg

i tried

look at those awesome reflections in the water!

not this gimmick again

What a shit middle name.

Exactly what is so awesome about ray-tracing besides reflections/shadowing if it looks like shit everywhere else and takes more computing power to do?

It's an effective use of masses of cores. Intel want people to think they need many cores so they need to find ways like this to convince you.

It's basically corporate.

Intel are on the cusp of being able to offer millions of consumers big advances in CPU tech which is going to go way beyond what average joe needs, because games are the only mainstream apps which justify anything faster than single core processors for most people.

I'm on a quad core here and apart from rendering, I notice zero difference from hugely inferior hardware I was using 3 years ago.

And that's their worry, without a market to attract people too as a company they could well find themselves stagnant and find themselves in a similar position to Microsoft where nobody wants or needs their new Vista OS or office 2-billion and Eight.

ray tracing in games would really put them back in the driving seat and create a hungry market, BUT they fail to realise that almost everything you can do with ray tracing, you will be able to do with current techniques given time and if you can't it's probably nothing to worry about anyway.

They are basically premature with this technology because they can already see they are approaching a plateau where sales growth will stagnate and fall as consumers keep current hardware because there is no need to upgrade.

It might be really good though, a GPU is a major price point in pc's, if Intel gained this control, it might really slash the cost of a powerful pc, but expereince tells me nothing ever works this way.
Goal posts will be moved, so right now I say competition is a good thing. It don't help intel when whenever they show this stuff it fails to impress, because nobody cares that reflections are physically correct when they run around aty 60 fps shooting aliens.