A Comparison of Pixel Complexity in Composition Techniques for Sort-Last Rendering

Sort-last rendering is a method of parallelizing compute-intensive computer graphics; specifically, the primitives that describe a scene are first allocated to a set of renderers, and the rendered images are then composited to give the final image. This paper surveys six such techniques and compares...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published inJournal of parallel and distributed computing Vol. 62; no. 1; pp. 152 - 171
Main Author Tay, Y.C.
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published San Diego, CA Elsevier Inc 01.01.2002
Elsevier
Subjects
Applied sciences
Artificial intelligence
computer graphics
Computer science; control theory; systems
Exact sciences and technology
object-parallel rendering
parallel composition
Pattern recognition. Digital image processing. Computational geometry
pixel complexity
computer graphics
object-parallel rendering
parallel composition
pixel complexity
Binary tree
Parallel system
Hypercube
Computer graphics
Bandwidth
Image rendering
Pixel
Complexity
Online AccessGet full text

Cover

More Information
Summary:Sort-last rendering is a method of parallelizing compute-intensive computer graphics; specifically, the primitives that describe a scene are first allocated to a set of renderers, and the rendered images are then composited to give the final image. This paper surveys six such techniques and compares their performance with active pixels, i.e., pixels that are covered by at least one primitive. Active pixels offer a uniform way of accounting for the time, space, and bandwidth costs in sort-last rendering. The comparison highlights the strengths of each technique. For example, tree composition has minimum work, binary-swap (hypercube) has minimum composition latency, direct pixel forwarding (mesh) has minimum bandwidth latency, and snooping (bus) has minimum bandwidth volume; binary-swap's bandwidth and composition latencies decrease, whereas the bandwidth volumes for direct pixel forwarding and snooping are constant, when the number of renderers increase; etc.
ISSN:0743-7315
1096-0848
DOI:10.1006/jpdc.2001.1771