Adaptive sampling of pixels is disclosed. In some embodiments, an initial rendering of a scene that determines texture at each portion of the scene is generated, and a ray traced rendering of the scene is generated by tracing an initial sample of rays. The following steps are iterated until all portions of the ray traced rendering satisfy a noise threshold: subtract the initial rendering of the scene from the ray traced rendering of the scene to determine a measure of noise at each portion of the ray traced rendering and trace another sample of rays in the ray traced rendering for each portion of the ray traced rendering that does not satisfy the noise threshold. The completed ray traced rendering is outputted. Different portions of the completed ray traced rendering are sampled with different numbers of samples of rays.