Physically Based Rendering - often GPU accelerated - is the new thing -- check out Octane Renderer, Lux-Render, Indigo, the Cycles renderer in Blender.

These renderers start at the light source and stochastically generate and follow photons. Like a digital camera they suffer from noise :-)

"These renderers start at the light source and stochastically generate and follow photons."

Yes, that's similar to ray tracing, but going 'backwards'

Rasterizing is certainly faster, requiring more work in the 'intelligence' of scene assembly.

With raytracing (or physics rendering) you have lights, objects 'naturally interacting' with each other so shadows, reflection, radiosity comes ""automatically"" (still hard to do)

With rasterizing you have triangles with different colors, and it's up to you to paint them accordingly.