Vista operates similarly to a ray tracer in that light paths are generated.

Yes, but I don't remember just renderer becoming synonymous with ray tracer, or offline professional renderer.

Most 3D modelers contain a number of related features, such as ray tracers and other rendering alternatives and texture mapping facilities.

Fairly simple to code and implement using a regular ray tracer.

They have achieved that with Arnold Renderer, an unbiased stochastic ray tracer.

The ray tracer will advance the ray over this distance, and then use a local derivative of the medium to calculate the ray's new direction.

The following effects can be integrated into a ray tracer in a straightforward fashion:

Enabling this effect in the ray tracer had only a 1% performance impact on the frame rate.

It is worth noting however, that certain features, particularly shadows, Anti-aliasing and Anim8or's resident ray tracer quickly become burdens on a computer's resources.

To test for this the ray tracer must compute and keep the product of the global and reflection coefficients as the rays are traced.