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A Survey of Multifragment Rendering
Author(s) -
Vasilakis A. A.,
Vardis K.,
Papaioannou G.
Publication year - 2020
Publication title -
computer graphics forum
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.578
H-Index - 120
eISSN - 1467-8659
pISSN - 0167-7055
DOI - 10.1111/cgf.14019
Subject(s) - rendering (computer graphics) , computer science , tiled rendering , parallel rendering , graphics pipeline , software rendering , computer graphics (images) , graphics , image based modeling and rendering , data science , 3d computer graphics
In the past few years, advances in graphics hardware have fuelled an explosion of research and development in the field of interactive and real‐time rendering in screen space. Following this trend, a rapidly increasing number of applications rely on multifragment rendering solutions to develop visually convincing graphics applications with dynamic content. The main advantage of these approaches is that they encompass additional rasterised geometry, by retaining more information from the fragment sampling domain, thus augmenting the visibility determination stage. With this survey, we provide an overview of and insight into the extensive, yet active research and respective literature on multifragment rendering. We formally present the multifragment rendering pipeline, clearly identifying the construction strategies, the core image operation categories and their mapping to the respective applications. We describe features and trade‐offs for each class of techniques, pointing out GPU optimisations and limitations and provide practical recommendations for choosing an appropriate method for each application. Finally, we offer fruitful context for discussion by outlining some existing problems and challenges as well as by presenting opportunities for impactful future research directions.