Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Tong-Yee Lee
• Raghavendra, C.S.
• Nicholas, J.B.

Titel

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

Ist Teil von

• IEEE transactions on visualization and computer graphics, 1996-09, Vol.2 (3), p.202-217

Ort / Verlag

New York, NY: IEEE

Erscheinungsjahr

1996

Quelle

IEEE/IET Electronic Library

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• 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 renderer. 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 282,144 triangle dataset is dose to 4.6 million triangles per second which is comparable to the speed of current state-of-the-art graphics workstations.