I disagree, it's quite a different algorithm, the main difference being ray tracing traces a path to each light in the scene at each intersection which requires

I disagree, it's quite a different algorithm, the main difference being ray tracing traces a path to each light in the scene at each intersection which requires far less steps to produce a visually pleasing image but is physically inaccurate, whereas path tracing takes no shortcuts, it traces a new ray at each intersection based only on the BRDF function until it either reaches the recursion limit or hits a light source, this is why it's so accurate but slow... It's not an extension of the ray tracing algorithm. But as others point out I suppose this hardware works at a lower level than either of these algorithms by essentially just accelerating ray intersections.