texelsoup

You're talking about an algorithmic problem (of a path tracer), this hardware just traces rays. It supposedly does so at 10x the efficiency of a high-end GPU (which isn't designed to do raytracing in the first place). That's the "groundbreaking" part.

For realtime use, this hardware will likely do no more than a single directional light's shadow plus and single bounce of sharp reflections. This is then combined with a rasterized view of the scene. Keep in mind that this is a "mobile" GPU that hasn't been "scaled up" for the Desktop yet.

For offline use, this hardware will at least be more efficient than a GPU.

Their hardware actually combines hardware rasterization and raytracing.

Depending on the implementation, raytracing can have many benefits over rasterization, such as: - ability to produce pixel-perfect shadows - sub-linear complexity on the amount of primitives (vs. linear for rasterization) - rays need not be coherent, i.e one can render non-linear projections or lots of small views

Path Tracing also is just another form of Raytracing. They demonstrated that their hardware can be used for it (just read the link).