Patent 7453461 was granted and assigned to Mental Images on November, 2008 by the United States Patent and Trademark Office.
A computer graphics system generates a pixel value for a pixel in an image and displays a human-perceptible image on an LCD CRT or other display device based on an electrical output generated in response to the pixel value, the pixel being representative of a point in a scene as recorded on an image plane of a simulated camera, the computer graphics system being configured to generate the pixel value for an image using a selected ray-tracing methodology in which simulated rays are shot from respective ones of a plurality of subpixels in the pixel each subpixel having coordinates in the image plane. The computer graphics system comprises a sample point generator and a function evaluator.