This sounds somewhat wrong. Ray tracing is just another term for path tracing, as paths are made up of traced rays. A naive camera-to-light witting ray tracer is still a sampling path tracer but has bias towards a specific subset of paths, namely those which follow specular bounces from the eye to the light or those which have one diffuse bounce.
Much of the progress in photorealistic rendering has come from improving the techniques used to sample paths. Bi-directional path tracing samples paths by tracing paths from both the light and the eye and performing a technique called multi-importance sampling in order to weight them appropriately. This allows the algorithm to pick up more light paths that would otherwise be hard to reach, such as those which form caustic reflections.
One of the more recent developments on this front is the use of the "specular manifold", which allows a path sampler to "walk" in path-space that allows capturing of even more partially-specular paths. (See Wenzel 2013.) This technique allows efficient sampling of the main light transport paths in scenes where a specular transparent surface surrounds a light source, ex a light bulb casing.
Edit: for this specific hardware, it sounds like they are using a hybrid approach so may very well be doing a basic eye-to-light ray tracing algorithm and then using raster for diffuse surface shading.
I thought I was clear that path tracing and ray tracing shared similarities. But ultimately they differ in several key ways.
For example, ray tracing tends to be deterministic, and it starts at the view frame and moves toward the scene and then light sources. Path tracing has no such constraint. Modern path tracing techniques use a combination of ray-tracing-like paths as well as paths beginning from light sources (gathering rays and shooting rays, in the parlance of the field).
In principle you could consider path tracing to be some sort of specialized subset of ray tracing (or vice versa for that matter) but in practice it is different enough in its specifics and implications that it makes more sense to treat it as merely related.
Much of the progress in photorealistic rendering has come from improving the techniques used to sample paths. Bi-directional path tracing samples paths by tracing paths from both the light and the eye and performing a technique called multi-importance sampling in order to weight them appropriately. This allows the algorithm to pick up more light paths that would otherwise be hard to reach, such as those which form caustic reflections.
One of the more recent developments on this front is the use of the "specular manifold", which allows a path sampler to "walk" in path-space that allows capturing of even more partially-specular paths. (See Wenzel 2013.) This technique allows efficient sampling of the main light transport paths in scenes where a specular transparent surface surrounds a light source, ex a light bulb casing.
Edit: for this specific hardware, it sounds like they are using a hybrid approach so may very well be doing a basic eye-to-light ray tracing algorithm and then using raster for diffuse surface shading.