It will when the resources used to emulate proper lighting gets close to the resources required by a ray tracer. That will happen if we continue to improve graphics.
Maybe we'll stop improving graphics sometime pretty soon and focus on physics, or maybe the game engine vendors will focus on licensing out assets to make game development cheaper instead of the current graphics race. But as long as the best use of GPU power we can come up with is graphics, we will eventually arrive at ray tracing.
Maybe we'll stop improving graphics sometime pretty soon and focus on physics, or maybe the game engine vendors will focus on licensing out assets to make game development cheaper instead of the current graphics race. But as long as the best use of GPU power we can come up with is graphics, we will eventually arrive at ray tracing.