Roughly speaking, ray tracing shoots rays from the camera frustum, bounces them off geometry, and sees what lights they hit. Path tracing is Monte Carlo integra

Roughly speaking, ray tracing shoots rays from the camera frustum, bounces them off geometry, and sees what lights they hit. Path tracing is Monte Carlo integration of the rendering equation. [0] It is easier to get soft shadows and global-illumantion-like effects with a path tracer. I remember reading articles circa 2013/2014 about Pixar moving to a path-tracer, which significantly reduced the amount of time they had to spend manually tuning lights and hacking in shadow effects, etc. [0] https://www.quora.com/Whats-the-difference-between-ray-tracing-and-path-tracing https://www.quora.com/Whats-the-difference-between-ray-traci...