Path Tracing Vs Ray Tracing. When using path tracing for rendering, the rays only produce a single ray per bounce. But in the end, both path tracing and ray tracing result in absolutely beautiful images.
What he describes as raytracing sounds ray-tracing / path-tracing as a category tends to be very branch-heavy with non-local data. When using path tracing for rendering, the rays only produce a single ray per bounce. So first up the question: what is path tracing?
HDR lighting is used as well to give more accurate lighting of spaces. "Ray tracing" means applying the ray casting technique to also determine visibility for shadows "Photon mapping" and "path tracing" are techniques for calculating certain kinds of light propagation This is an orthogonal problem to ray trace vs rasterization.
If the goal is to save the global illumination calculation to be used repeatedly as some sort of GI map that doesn't change unless scene changes then path tracing is out of question.
Ray tracing produces images that can be indistinguishable from those captured by a camera. We prefer backward tracing which consists of tracing the path of light rays from the eye, back to the light source where they originated from. The pixels start to fill in with final shading color after a few.