Stochastic addition of rays in a ray tracing image processing system

According to embodiments of the invention, rays may be stochastically culled before they are issued into the three-dimensional scene. Stochastically culling rays may reduce the number of rays which need to be traced by the image processing system. Furthermore, by stochastically culling rays before they are issued into the three-dimensional scene, minor imperfections may be added to the final rendered image, thereby improving the realism of the rendered image. Therefore, stochastic culling of rays may improve the performance of the image processing system by reducing workload imposed on the image processing system and improving the realism of the images rendered by the image processing system. According to another embodiment of the invention, the realism of images rendered by the image processing system may also be improved by stochastically adding secondary rays after ray-primitive intersections have occurred.