The disclosure provides a renderer and a rendering process employing ray tracing and image-space filtering that interleaves the pixels of a frame into partial image fields and corresponding reduced-resolution images that are individually processed in parallel. In one example, the renderer includes: (1) an interface configured to receive scene information for rendering a full frame, and (2) a graphics processing system, coupled to the interface, configured to separate pixels of the full frame into different partial image fields that each include a unique set of interleaved pixels, render reduced-resolution images of the full frame by ray tracing the different partial image fields in parallel, independently apply image-space filtering to the reduced-resolution images in parallel, and merge the reduced-resolution images to provide a full rendered frame.