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Immediate Mode, Retained Mode

Immediate Mode: issue drawing commands explicitly; the graphics API does not know how to build the 3D world on its own; examples: OpenGL, DirectX
Retained Mode: construct and store the 3D world using the API; rendering is handled automatically; examples: Java3D, OpenInventor, OpenSceneGraph, most game engines; usually a scenegraph is created to store the 3D world hierarchically

Photo Realism

Up to now, we even used only local illumination models, which lack shadows and reflections.
Global illumination:

Ray Tracing
Radiosity

Note that in commercial software these terms are used differently: Global illumination is understood to include indirect illumination; radiosity is used as a synonym for that notion of global illumination.
Computer graphics (real-time as well as offline) hardly delivers photorealistic images. Some points where this is obvious:

soft shadows
blurred reflections
caustics

Graphics Hardware

Some examples of my work:

Hard-edged textures with little computational overhead
Motion blur using anisotropic filtering
Plausible cloth wrinkles