General question with regards to ray tracing.

Does activating this setting change the rendering-method fundamentally,

yes

does this option switch the rendering method from conventional rasterization to ray-tracing, or is still the conventional rasterization method in combination with raytracing used?

my guess is yes it switches to ray-tracing, why ?

because for example in directx 12, DXR is a new API with 4 new concepts :

• with functions such as DispatchRays to offload the work to the raytracer shader (this should remind u of Dispatch( ) for the Compute Shader); it's in the same spirit
• new shaders ray-generation (called when DispatchRay is called CPU side), closest-hit, any-hit, and miss ….
• the raytracing pipeline state, (this is like what was the rasterization state but instead for raytracing on the gpu)
• and the acceleration structure, a 2-level tree structure that u code that describes yr scene and that tells the gpu how to quickly traverse it; it's more or a less a BVH (bounded volume hierarchy)

and with this all, u can still do things such as AO, GI, shadows, reflections etc… even AI (with hardware tensor cores on a RTX card);

so the conventional raster era is now approaching end of time ?

Until then ?

EulerianPendulum said:
Does activating this setting change the rendering-method fundamentally, i.e. does this option switch the rendering method from conventional rasterization to ray-tracing, or is still the conventional rasterization method in combination with raytracing used?

Depends on the game, World of Warcraft ie. only uses raytracing for shadows (which the option also clearly states). So at least its totally possible to use ray-tracing only as part of a render-pipeline, which in the case of WoW makes sense since having high-raytraced shadow-quality on my 2080 seems to use the raytracing-core to their maximum capacity (so framerate would probably be unplayable if the whole game was raytraced at that point).

All games so far only use raytracing as an optional part of the pipeline, other than an obscure game called Claybook and a 3DMark benchmark.

Rasterization is always used for primary visibility in all those other games.