Accordingly, in at least one embodiment, each rendering engine (or host) renders an entire image, based on samples in distinct locations for each pixel of the image. As noted earlier, the distinct locations at which a particular rendering engine performs sampling may be specified by an intra-pixel computational sequence. The intra-pixel computational sequence may correspond specifically to that particular rendering engine. A merge process may then combine rendering results received from the multiple rendering engines into a single image that is to be viewed by the artist. Accordingly, the image may be displayed in a manner such that a quality of the displayed image progressively improves over time, without exhibiting characteristics of a tile-pattern sweep appearing around a display, as if the image were being incrementally built by tiles (or blocks of tiles). The results produced by all (or at least some of) the total number of rendering engines contribute to an overall image in a more well-distributed manner.

As will be described in more detail later with reference to at least one embodiment, the rendering engines do not themselves utilize computing resources (e.g., computation time) in determining stopping conditions with respect to processing one or more pixels. Rather, according to at least one embodiment, that determination is performed on behalf of the rendering engines by the merge process.