(I'm assuming this is a reply to my raytracing comment)
This is most likely true. Additionally, raytracing just might produce samples that are too regular for this to work well. I haven't really thought about it :)
Regularity helps, not hinders, but it's surely not going to be real-time. It might be faster than ray tracing every pixel, but that depends on many factors that I don't know/understand.
I could be wrong, though -- I only did this back-of-the-envelope a few months ago. I never really tried that hard to make it work.