Global Illumination vs Ray Tracing vs Path Tracing?

Ray tracing is the name of a rendering technique.

Global Illumination is one thing that can be done with ray tracing or other rendering techniques. It’s basically the simulation of indirect lighting. It can also be simulated by using other algorithms less intensive on the GPU than pure hardware ray tracing. That is the case here in the UE5 tech demo: they said that ray tracing wasn’t used here.

Path Tracing is another name for “Full Ray Tracing” that encompasses global illumination, reflections, shadows...

It’s funny you posted that question as I was just finishing watching that video from Walt Disney Animation: https://youtu.be/frLwRLS_ZR0

/r/PS5 Thread