For real GI, Path Tracing, Photon Mapping and so on are the methods of choice and not Ray Tracing.
For real GI, Path Tracing, Photon Mapping and so on are the methods of choice and not Ray Tracing.
Global illumination is where we want to go to surpass the realism of current games, but path tracing and photon mapping are both fundamentally based on ray-tracing. Any hardware that makes ray-tracing go faster (especially for incoherent rays) should also help to speed up global illumination.
Depending on the implementation, raytracing can have many benefits over rasterization, such as: - ability to produce pixel-perfect shadows - sub-linear complexity on the amount of primitives (vs. linear for rasterization) - rays need not be coherent, i.e one can render non-linear projections or lots of small views
Path Tracing also is just another form of Raytracing. They demonstrated that their hardware can be used for it (just read the link).