That's a bit of a stretch. Pixar didn't use ray-tracing until Cars [2006]. Even then, it was only applied for secondary effects.
It wasn't until Monsters University [2013] that they produced the majority of a movie using ray-tracing [1]. That's a recent development, IMHO.
[1] http://thisanimatedlife.blogspot.com/2013/05/pixars-chris-ho...