Generally ray tracing is fast enough today to get some solid quality rendering, but...
Now, I've been contributing to one academic project for some time, first - this is Aila/Laine work on high performance ray tracing in CUDA:
https://code.google.com/p/understanding-the-efficiency-of-ray-traversal-on-gpus/
We took their project and started adding some stuff (I based my thesis on the new-added stuff ... and generally a theory around it), we ended up with quite large framework that is able to use a lot more features:
https://github.com/marekvinkler/NTrace
The features that were added are -> Solid texture support, path tracing support (bidirectional path tracing is currently WIP), more acceleration structures (right now we have KD-Trees and BVHs (with several ways to build, including HLBVH)), multiple materials support, etc.
The only large problem with this project is, that we based our code on top of Aila/Laine framework (not that it is bad, but it isn't something you can turn into library and give it out to public ... it would need a lot of work), and the bigger problem... it is in CUDA, I hate platform specific code (and I love OpenCL), but as I stated before, it is academic project - academics like CUDA, they prefer it + the other guy wanted to base the code on top of existing framework.
I've been trying to write a OpenCL based library (and example files) with my experiences from that project (and several others that involved ray tracing, but they were a lot smaller), that would generally allow to perform ray tracing using "any device" (not all of them, but at least all that supports OpenCL) without some crazy dependencies. I've got to the state, where it worked (it still was slower than NTrace, supporting just some older BVH schemes, etc.). I currently don't have time to fully continue my work on the project (any contributors are welcome ... just joking of course ) - but if you would like to get access to it, I have it on local Linux machine, putting it up into git isn't a problem and you could check that out (that project is several times smaller than NTrace and in my opinion easier to read).