Slightly confused about what you mean here. As I understand it, ray tracing is just one of a few different global illumination approaches. In my graphics cours

Slightly confused about what you mean here. As I understand it, ray tracing is just one of a few different global illumination approaches. In my graphics course many years ago, we implemented radiosity, photon mapping and path tracing, and they were better for some kinds of scenes than straight forward ray tracing. Some of these approaches support soft shadows very naturally, but ray tracing is not one of them - good soft shadows with ray tracing still involves some hacks.