Image composition schemes for sort-last polygon rendering on 2d mesh multicomputers

Tong Yee Lee, C. S. Raghavendra, John B. Nicholas

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

51 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

In a sort-last polygon rendering system, the efficiency of image composition Is very important for achieving fast rendering, in this paper, the implementation of a sort-last rendering system on a general purpose multicomputer system is described. A two-phase sort-last-full image composition scheme is described first, and then many variants of it are presented for 2D mesh message-passing multiComputers, such as the Intel Delta and Paragon. All the proposed schemes are analyzed and experimentally evaluated on Caltech's Intel Delta machine for our sort-last parallel polygon Tenderer. Experimental results show that sort-last-sparse strategies are better suited than sort-last-full schemes for software implementation on a general purpose multicomputer system. Further, interleaved composition regions perform better than coherent regions. In a large multicomputer system, performance can be improved by carefully scheduling the tasks of rendering and communication. Using 512 processors to render our test scenes, the peak rendering rate achieved on a 262,144 triangle dataset is close to 4.6 million triangles per second which is comparable to the speed of current state-of-the-art graphics workstations.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)202-217
Number of pages16
JournalIEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics
Volume2
Issue number3
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 1996

All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes

  • Software
  • Signal Processing
  • Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
  • Computer Graphics and Computer-Aided Design

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