Ray tracing is just colliding a line with some other goemetric primitive. It doesn't imply Whitted ray tracing at all. Basically all offline rendering now in toy renderers to high end production renderers is some sort of physically based ray tracing, so it is the norm rather than the exception.
The point is definitely pedantic but the differentiating factor in my mind isn't whether the ray is physically based or not. The important fact is that the ray undergoes multiple bounces, so at the end, a pixel isn't lit with a single ray, but many rays that meet end to end.
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Ray tracing is just colliding a line with some other goemetric primitive. It doesn't imply Whitted ray tracing at all. Basically all offline rendering now in toy renderers to high end production renderers is some sort of physically based ray tracing, so it is the norm rather than the exception.
The point is definitely pedantic but the differentiating factor in my mind isn't whether the ray is physically based or not. The important fact is that the ray undergoes multiple bounces, so at the end, a pixel isn't lit with a single ray, but many rays that meet end to end.