Parallel Depth Merge: A Paradigm for Hidden Surface Removal

摘要

A new parallel approach to Hidden Surface Removal (HSR), called Parallel Depth-Merge (PDM), is proposed. PDM, intrinsically parallel, couples any already known HSR object-space algorithm with an image-space hierarchical merger. Resulting data are returned in a format well suited both to be plotted on vector devices and to be used in shadow computations and shading algorithms. The proposed approach is designed for Multiple-instruction, Multiple-data (MIMD) architectures, which use either shared or non-shared memory, and does not require any special purpose hardware.