No. You are poorly informed...
Ray tracing is not new...what Nvidia made was hardware that would perform the specific calculations needed to trace diffusion and diffraction. If you are somehow unsure of this, I ask you to think back. Maybe a long time ago...maybe not. Think back to basic highschool physics. Think back to that diagram where a light ray impacts a glass surface at about 45 degrees, some of it diffuses on the surface, but part of that ray enters the glass, bounces off the opposite side, and exits the glass a little later. Do you maybe remember it now? Yes, ray tracing is simply diffraction and diffusion calculations performed as one...because in traditional rendering light is not treated as an object and therefore requires multiple passes to create depth effects.
If you want the wikipedia explanation it's here:
Wikipedia - Ray Tracing
That said, this is exactly the same as physics. Remember when a body was considered rigid? That meant you had a bunch of sticks around an explosive barrel, they'd fly away as solid sticks. Then Physx came along and treated those sticks as either deformable bodies or destructible bodies. This meant those sticks around the explosive barrel didn't just bounce around, they blew up into little tiny pieces, then the calculation for particles could start taking over as the dust settled.
Ray tracing does none of this. It literally only provide more photorealistic behavior for light rays...which is great if you want that. It's less great if you can tolerate water looking like Bioshock and being entirely immersive...because I don't need the next COD operator to have slightly prettier grease paint on their face that I have to spend $10 on top of the $70 game price...so that my latest $2000 purchase is justifiable in any way....because something at half the price has similar raster performance so there must be a reason I spent all of that money...
/s
