While I was tempted to make the same statement/assumption, the breakdown in the article/tech-tear-down seems to show a near-completely ray traced frame with only a very, very small portion of rasterization usage. If this update is indicative of the AAA spaces rendering proclivities I would say your statement just isn’t true any longer.

I think one of the strong suits of game graphics is the results at any cost model of rendering tech, where the focus is on using whatever methods get the best results the fastest (and hopefully within frame budgets) wins out. Since the advent of polygon rendering rasterization has been the best solution for attempts at realism (be that hyper- or photo- realism). However, rasterization and the rendering ‘shortcuts’ used to achieve certain effects were also useful for other styles of rendering. However, if every bit of graphics silicon is going to be designed and optimized for a physically based, photorealistic rendering result it may be difficult to bend that functionality toward some non-photorealistic usage.

I worry everything is going to end up having the same stamped out photorealistic appearance, in a similar way to the comments I’ve seen about the emerging Unreal 5 ‘look’. And that to get away from that look will require giving up a large chunk of GPU rendering horse power.

Animated movies use pathtracing and don't have that problem. You can get a lot of looks out of it, and do things like tune the color saturation of bounces.

Indeed it does. Most of the ray/path tracing happens in screen space.

Most games (including Cyberpunk without the path tracing mode) do use hybrid renderers indeed (so it's sprinkling ray tracing to specific parts of the traditional pipeline).

The path tracing mode mentioned here however, does "full raytracing" like blender does (outside of a few exceptions such as particles). Same with Portal RTX, Quake RTX and a few others.

It seems transparent geometry isn't being path traced (or if they are, they immediately terminate the ray on hit and applying the same trick as in their rasterizer)

No, it doesn't. Not entirely anyway. All the light transport is calculated using path tracing but primary visibility is still using the rasterizer.

https://www.nvidia.com/en-au/geforce/news/cyberpunk-2077-ray...

Nvidia's own announcement shows the path tracing overdrive mode is still tracing rays from a G-buffer, which would've been generated with the rasterizer.

I actually don't think Blender does "full ray tracing" exactly either, or at least at some point it didn't. At least to the point where you do get some rasterization artifacts, like being able to see the polygons on the edge of objects. That's probably about as good as you can get. Combined with a "nanite" like technology, it's probably not much of a problem.

As others have explained: that is becoming less and less true as time and tech marches on.

For now, we'll always have both, as too many cards/consoles can't path trace at a good enough rate. But the artist pipeline wins that come from fully path tracing lights are too good to pass up, so it's coming.

This article alone shows that basically all of the frame is path traced rather than raster. It's coming, and faster you might think.