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.