R-Buffer: A Pointerless A-Buffer Hardware Architecture
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Date
2001
Authors
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
The Eurographics Association
Abstract
We present a graphics hardware architecture that implements Carpenter's A-buffer. The A-buffer is a software renderer that uses pointer based linked lists. Our pointerless approach computes order independent transparency for any number of layers with minimal hardware complexity. Statistics are shown for a variety of different scenes using a trace based methodology, with an instrumented Mesa OpenGL implementation. The architecture is shown to require from 2.1 to 3.6 times more memory than traditional Z-buffering. A detailed hardware design is provided, Order independent transparency is computed without application sorting and without artifacts. The architecture can also be used for antialiasing, and an example of Carpenter's classical A-buffer antialiasing is shown.
Description
@inproceedings{:10.2312/EGGH/EGGH01/073-080,
booktitle = {Eurographics/SIGGRAPH Graphics Hardware Workshop 2001},
editor = {Kurt Akeley and Ulrich Neumann},
title = {{R-Buffer: A Pointerless A-Buffer Hardware Architecture}},
author = {Wittenbrink, Craig M.},
year = {2001},
publisher = {The Eurographics Association},
ISSN = {1727-3471},
ISBN = {158113407X},
DOI = {/10.2312/EGGH/EGGH01/073-080}
}