The Guerilla guy naively used the term "raytracing" very loosely to describe their screen-space-reflections solution, which is a gross aproximation of local reflections that has some sort of rays, and some sort of tracing to it. But when most people talk about RayTracing they mean ray-intersection tests against full scene geometry, usually polygons, sometimes voxels, and ideally complex surfaces, but when people talk about raytracing they are rarelly talking about a hack to sort of ray march against the extremelly incomplete point representation of the scene that is the G-buffer obtained through good old rasterization. If you are defining RT this broadly, then multiple SSAO algos used in ps360 games out there could have been classified as raytraced global illumination too, which would not be completely wrong, but for all practical uses would be complete nonsense.
There was a little bit of media paraphrasing this presentation´s misleading use of the term as if it meant a huge and unbelievable achievement for ps4 and GG, which was very misinformative. To avoid those kinds of misunderstandings again, I´d love for devs and tech entusiasts to just keep calling this type of rendering feature SSR, or SSLR (L for local) and for the media to make better fact checking and get consulting with people more versed in underlying rendering technology before jumping into wrong conclusions and spreading them over the web.
?
