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Path tracing and ray tracing are sort of mangled concepts, mostly because of Nvidia's marketing.
Path tracing is mostly just a technique to make actual full ray-tracing more efficient using Monte Carlo integration methods.
Nvidia (and AMD following them) have been improving this technique using a plethora of (mostly ML/DL) acceleration algorithms and hardware. It's to the point that by 2030 it probably will be nearly as efficient as hybrid solutions (like "ray tracing reflections", "lumen", etc.)
Most of what is called "ray-tracing" in games is just hybrid systems that apply ray tracing conditionally to different parts of the raster pipeline. But ray-tracing historically described the general task of modeling lighting using ray intersections with geometry. Path tracing definitely falls in that category.
There are actually many ray tracing methods that have similar quality (within the overlapping target use case): whitted (recursive), cook (distributed), radiosity + ray tracing, kajiya (aka Path Tracing), etc. The only reason it is slower than "ray tracing" in games is because "ray tracing" in games is actually not full ray tracing, but hybrid lighting.
Edit: All of this is to say we already have "partial" this generation. Next generation will be much closer to "full."
Last edited by sc94597 - 1 day ago
