As also described earlier, different rendering engines 130 may concurrently provide results for a same pixel of an image depicting the scene. With respect to a particular pixel of an image, the rendering engines 130 may continually render the scene by tracing rays (e.g., an increasing number of rays) into the pixel in order to point sample a high-order continuous signal. The more samples that are traced into the pixel, the more the computed color of the resulting pixel will approximate the correct final color (also referred to as the “ground truth”).

As will be described in more detail below, embodiments of the present invention are distinguishable from approaches in which tiles (e.g., blocks of pixels that may individually be, for example, 8 pixels by 8 pixels in dimension) are assigned to rendering processes (e.g., rendering engines 130) in a round-robin (or similar) fashion, where each rendering process is assigned a different tile to render. In such approaches, an image that is rendered via an interactive loop or process characteristically results in individual tiles appearing on a display according to some pattern, as the rendering for each individual tile is completed (or performed). Effectively, the artist is given an impression that the image is being incrementally built by tiles (or blocks of tiles).