GLOSSARY
Ray-traced shadows are calculated and rendered in much the same way as images in an object-oriented drawing program. As a result, they’re resolution-independent.
They always produce a hard edge, which can be an advantage or a disadvantage, depending on the effect you want, and they can take longer to render, depending on the number of faces in the geometry they’re affecting.
The renderer generates ray-traced shadows by tracing the path of rays sampled from the light source. Ray-traced shadows are more accurate than shadow maps. For example, only ray-tracing can generate shadows for wireframe objects, and they cast accurate shadows from transparent and translucent objects.