According to one embodiment of the invention, by increasing the number of rays issued through adjacent pixels with colors of high contrast while maintaining the number of rays issued through adjacent pixels which do not have colors of high contrast, a ray tracing image processing system may render an anti-aliased image while minimizing the increase in workload experienced by the image processing system. Additionally, according to another embodiment of the invention, by maintaining the number of rays issued through adjacent pixels which have colors of low contrast while increasing the number of rays issued through adjacent pixels which do not have colors of low contrast, the image processing system may reduce workload experienced while performing ray tracing while maintaining the quality of the rendered image.