Sind menschliche Augen Path Tracer oder eher Ray Tracer?

None of them…

There are huge differences between the real world and a virtual scenery in a computer simulation.

In the real world, light beams are more or less scattered from a light source. These meet real surfaces and are reflected/scattered/broken and meet other surfaces to be reflected/scattered/broken again… This runs until the light beams thus changed hit an eye (or not)

…and completely indifference whether an eye perceives it, light rays/waves migrate through space innumerable. The eye only perceives the photons which dirch 2mm pupil hit the retina. The eye itself is passive and the end of the few “beams” that reach it.

It does not track the rays, but only receives them.

For Countless Light beams then also lie the crunch point for computer models. It would be insane to simulate/follow all rays of a virtual light source, since most people do not end in the eye, but disappear in the “nothing”. How to efficiently find out the rays that end in the “virtual eye”?

The method of doing it to the real world would be extremely inefficient

“If a tree falls in the forest and no one is there who hears it, does it sound?”

Let’s put the whole thing on the head…

If there is no virtual eye that observes the virtual scenery, there is no need to track a light beam…and our virtual eye is only at a defined location and the billions of other possible positions are uninteresting.

What is closer to puffing with biology and physics and making the eye a “beamer”? Then we only have to follow the path of the imaginary rays of “virtual ray eye” through into the scenery. …and with a few angle calculations it is possible to determine whether the steel meets a light source at some point, or if a predetermined number of reflections are damped to such an extent that it becomes 0. Areas covered by other objects also need not be evaluated.

This reversal of a “light path” raytracing is merely a trick to minimize the necessary computing power by excluding irrelevant beam paths from the outset.

https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raytracing

Pathtraycing is only a special form in which diffuse reflections are also included in the calculation by ” scattering models”.

As said, a real eye does not send rays…. , it only perceives from the fullness of light beams that happen.

I’m a relic of a time when PCs ran with 16MHz. But even in this time the people were fascinated by artificially produced sceneries.

The most famous Raytracer was POV-Ray with a huge fan community. At that time there were no graphics cards with millions of render units. A virtual scenery to render in 640×480 pixels could take good and like to take a few hours to days.