research-article

Reducing shading on GPUs using quad-fragment merging

Authors:

Kayvon Fatahalian,

Solomon Boulos,

William R. Mark,

Pat HanrahanAuthors Info & Claims

ACM Transactions on Graphics (TOG), Volume 29, Issue 4

Article No.: 67, Pages 1 - 8

https://doi.org/10.1145/1778765.1778804

Published: 26 July 2010 Publication History

Abstract

Current GPUs perform a significant amount of redundant shading when surfaces are tessellated into small triangles. We address this inefficiency by augmenting the GPU pipeline to gather and merge rasterized fragments from adjacent triangles in a mesh. This approach has minimal impact on output image quality, is amenable to implementation in fixed-function hardware, and, when rendering pixel-sized triangles, requires only a small amount of buffering to reduce overall pipeline shading work by a factor of eight. We find that a fragment-shading pipeline with this optimization is competitive with the REYES pipeline approach of shading at micropolygon vertices and, in cases of complex occlusion, can perform up to two times less shading work.

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Cited By

Rosenzweig LShacklett BXia WFatahalian K(2024)High-Throughput Batch Rendering for Embodied AISIGGRAPH Asia 2024 Conference Papers10.1145/3680528.3687629(1-9)Online publication date: 3-Dec-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3680528.3687629
Yuan YWang RBao H(2020)Tile Pair-Based Adaptive Multi-Rate Stereo ShadingIEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics10.1109/TVCG.2018.288331426:6(2303-2314)Online publication date: 1-Jun-2020
https://doi.org/10.1109/TVCG.2018.2883314
Hasselgren JAndersson MAkenine-Möller TLuebke DMolnar S(2016)Masked software occlusion cullingProceedings of High Performance Graphics10.5555/2977336.2977340(23-31)Online publication date: 20-Jun-2016
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/2977336.2977340
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Index Terms

Reducing shading on GPUs using quad-fragment merging
1. Computing methodologies
  1. Computer graphics
    1. Graphics systems and interfaces
      1. Graphics processors

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Published In

cover image ACM Transactions on Graphics

ACM Transactions on Graphics Volume 29, Issue 4

July 2010

942 pages

ISSN:0730-0301

EISSN:1557-7368

DOI:10.1145/1778765

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Copyright © 2010 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 26 July 2010

Published in TOG Volume 29, Issue 4

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Cited By

Rosenzweig LShacklett BXia WFatahalian K(2024)High-Throughput Batch Rendering for Embodied AISIGGRAPH Asia 2024 Conference Papers10.1145/3680528.3687629(1-9)Online publication date: 3-Dec-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3680528.3687629
Yuan YWang RBao H(2020)Tile Pair-Based Adaptive Multi-Rate Stereo ShadingIEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics10.1109/TVCG.2018.288331426:6(2303-2314)Online publication date: 1-Jun-2020
https://doi.org/10.1109/TVCG.2018.2883314
Hasselgren JAndersson MAkenine-Möller TLuebke DMolnar S(2016)Masked software occlusion cullingProceedings of High Performance Graphics10.5555/2977336.2977340(23-31)Online publication date: 20-Jun-2016
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/2977336.2977340
Krajcevski PManocha D(2016)Compressed Coverage Masks for Path Rendering on Mobile GPUsIEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics10.1109/TVCG.2016.251699022:10(2229-2238)Online publication date: 1-Oct-2016
https://doi.org/10.1109/TVCG.2016.2516990
Chen XNixon KChen Y(2016)Practical power consumption analysis with current smartphones2016 29th IEEE International System-on-Chip Conference (SOCC)10.1109/SOCC.2016.7905505(333-337)Online publication date: Sep-2016
https://doi.org/10.1109/SOCC.2016.7905505
Andersson MHasselgren JAkenine-Möller T(2015)Masked depth culling for graphics hardwareACM Transactions on Graphics10.1145/2816795.281813834:6(1-9)Online publication date: 2-Nov-2015
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2816795.2818138
Martin-Brualla RGallup DSeitz S(2015)Time-lapse mining from internet photosACM Transactions on Graphics10.1145/276690334:4(1-8)Online publication date: 27-Jul-2015
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2766903
Krajcevski PManocha DKeyser JSander PSubr KWei L(2015)Compressed coverage masks for path rendering on mobile GPUsProceedings of the 19th Symposium on Interactive 3D Graphics and Games10.1145/2699276.2699291(101-108)Online publication date: 27-Feb-2015
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2699276.2699291
Johnsson BAkenine-Möller T(2015)A performance and energy evaluation of many-light rendering algorithmsThe Visual Computer: International Journal of Computer Graphics10.1007/s00371-014-1046-y31:12(1671-1681)Online publication date: 1-Dec-2015
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1007/s00371-014-1046-y
Clarberg PMunkberg J(2014)Deep shading buffers on commodity GPUsACM Transactions on Graphics10.1145/2661229.266124533:6(1-12)Online publication date: 19-Nov-2014
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2661229.2661245
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