Out-of-core sort-first parallel rendering for cluster-based tiled displays
✍ Scribed by Wagner T Corrêa; James T Klosowski; Cláudio T Silva
- Book ID
- 104304214
- Publisher
- Elsevier Science
- Year
- 2003
- Tongue
- English
- Weight
- 166 KB
- Volume
- 29
- Category
- Article
- ISSN
- 0167-8191
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
✦ Synopsis
We present a sort-first parallel system for out-of-core rendering of large models on clusterbased tiled displays. The system renders high-resolution images of large models at interactive frame rates using off-the-shelf PCs with small memory. Given a model, we use an out-of-core preprocessing algorithm to build an on-disk hierarchical representation for the model. At run time, each PC renders the image for a display tile, using an out-of-core rendering approach that employs multiple threads to overlap rendering, visibility computation, and disk operations. The system can operate in approximate mode for real-time rendering, or in conservative mode for rendering with guaranteed accuracy. Running our system in approximate mode on a cluster of 16 PCs each with 512 MB of main memory, we are able to render 12-megapixel images of a 13-million-triangle model with 99.3% of accuracy at 10.8 frames per second. Rendering such a large model at high resolutions and interactive frame rates would typically require expensive high-end graphics hardware. Our results show that a cluster of inexpensive PCs is an attractive alternative to those high-end systems.