Parallel Architectures and Algorithms for Real-Time Synthesis of High Quality Images Using Deferred Shading.

摘要

High-end graphics workstations provide us with the ability to interactively display polygonal models of high geometric complexity. It is our hope that future graphics workstations will also provide us with shading models that go beyond Gouraud shading of polygons. This paper describes performance improvements that result from storing a polygon's shading parameters at each pixel and deferring the shading calculations until all the polygons have been processed. One benefit of this approach is that the shading calculations are only performed on the parts of a surface that are visible, which means that this method becomes more attractive as shading models become more complex and as the depth complexity of the scene increases. We also show how this method can be used to produce real-time images that incorporate Phong shading and procedural texture mapping on Pixel-Planes 5. Pixel-Planes 5 is a massively parallel SIMD machine that is under construction at UNC. Since the processing elements of Pixel-Planes are fully programmable, new shading models can be incorporated in the system without any hardware modifications.