This is a very interesting summary for one such "GPU raytracer" project:

http://www.ce.chalmers.se/edu/proj/raygpu/index.php?view=projects

In particular:
"So far we have not been able to acquire rendering times that compete with
established ray tracers like mental ray but then again this has never been the
objective of this thesis. Writing fast ray tracers with the help of graphics
hardware is something that we believe is definitely possible though. A good
idea is probably to use the graphics card only for some parts of the rendering
like for example intersection tests and shading and letting the CPU take care
of the traversal of data structures and such."

I thought running it through a GPU would automatically yield even a naive
raytracer an immense boost in performance.  But then, not even MentalRay nor
VRay seem much interested in running on GPU either.

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