The names reflect pretty well what’s in the inner loop. A rasterizer’s outer loop is over the scene (objects/triangles/etc), and the inner loop is over pixels.

The names reflect pretty well what’s in the inner loop. A rasterizer’s outer loop is over the scene (objects/triangles/etc), and the inner loop is over pixels. It does what it says in the sense that it’s rasterizing each primitive one at a time. A ray tracer, on the other hand, is (sometimes) looping over pixels in the outer loop, and then iterating over objects (“traversing the scene”) in the inner loop. The existing names are also good descriptors in the sense that they describe the core of what must be computed. A rasterizer always rasterizes. A ray tracer always traces rays but does not always result in pixels, the result can end up in a spatial data structure, it can trace resolution independent shadows & reflections, it can save results in a cache that gets rasterized later, it can end up in multiple pixels (splatting, pixel filtering), etc., etc.. Yes it’s very common to render pixels with a ray tracer, but it’s not required or inherently part of the algorithm, while rasterization doesn’t exist without pixels.