I wonder if the Sorted Deferred Shading algorithm from Disney's Hyperion renderer could be adapted to realtime rendering? Optimizing a renderer that does one frame every 10 minutes to produce one every 16ms is difficult, but a scaled-down version with a lot of fakery might be possible.
It won't - at least for general ray intersection itself, the deferred sorting doesn't buy you that much - the main benefit it gives you is much more coherent texture accesses, which Disney needs because they use PTex which needs coherent access for the filtering.
Almost everyone else is still doing pretty much shade-on-hit one-at-a-time and getting pretty good performance out of it.
PRMan RIS is batching shading points up, but after the first bounce the batches get much smaller, so the win you get from it is much less.
Disney do a lot of work sorting the batches, and that takes time.
Also their render times for full frames are generally 12 hours wall clock or more (like most of the rest of the VFX industry). And Disney are heavily de-noising their images afterwards anyway.
http://www.disneyanimation.com/technology/innovations/hyperi...