Firstly, it’s worth considering how much rendering has actually changed over the past 20 years, since the introduction of hardware acceleration. Whilst we may still be using polys, there have been lots of other changes, from going from forward to reverse rendering, g buffers, the introduction & evolution of shaders etc.
We haven’t failed to move on because we’re happy with what we’ve got, but that we haven’t had hardware suitable for other methods.
There were a few games in the mid-late 90s that embraced voxels to create large landscapes, which wouldn’t have been handled so well with polys, but within a couple of years of the first Delta Force being related, GFX hardware could handle landscapes on that scale better with polys than voxels.
What is interesting is to see hardware ray tracing units coming on PowerVR cards. I’d like to know more about their performance against GPUs and CPUs doing those calculations themselves. If they offer a significant gain, then I’d expect to see them crop up on AMD & NVidia GPUs in 3-5 years time (I assume there is no patent on hardware ray tracing units). Those units have the potential speed up AI, IK, physics and audio and we know Nvidia and AMD are both trying to get their GPUs to do more than just GFX.