An anti-aliasing technique for sampling an image for display on a pixel based display is presented. The image, or set of objects forming an image, is sampled at a resolution higher than the pixel spatial resolution. The resultant multiple sampled values for each pixel are accumulated, and the accumulated value is used to determine an average pixel value that is used for the display of the pixel. To minimize memory requirements, the rendering plane is used to temporarily store a portion of the accumulated value for each pixel. To minimize processing, the multiple of samples per pixel is a power of 2, and the portion of the accumulated value that is stored in the rendering plane is the most significant bits (MSB) of the accumulated value. Because of the use of a power of 2 as the number of samples, the MSB of the accumulated value is equal to the average of the accumulated value, and therefore the need for an explicit computation of an average for each pixel is eliminated. Because the rendering plane is used to store this average of the accumulated value, the explicit process of moving the computed average value to each corresponding pixel location in the rendering plane is also eliminated.