Real-time ray racing has finally become reality. Following individual rays through a virtual scene leads to highly accurate renderings but the associated computational cost has so far prevented its interactive use. While mostly known in the computer graphics space, a lot of computational science and HPC applications perform similar operations. The ray tracing capabilities available on the latest generation GPUs, including the hardware support for ray-tracing via the RTCores on the Turing GPUs, are therefore of relevance not only to applications that generate colorful pixels, but also to applications performing ray-tracing like operations, including particles tracking in complex geometries or even spatial database searches. In this talk I will briefly summarize the features enabling real-time ray tracing and will look at the impact this technology has on scientific visualization and HPC applications in general.