High-Performance Software Rasterization on GPUs

Abstract

In this paper, we implement an efficient, completely software-based graphics pipeline on a GPU. Unlike previous approaches, we obey ordering constraints imposed by current graphics APIs, guarantee hole-free rasterization, and support multisample antialiasing. Our goal is to examine the performance implications of not exploiting the fixed-function graphics pipeline, and to discern which additional hardware support would benefit software-based graphics themost. We present significant improvements over previous work in terms of scalability, performance, and capabilities. Our pipeline is malleable and easy to extend, and we demonstrate that in a wide variety of test cases its performance is within a factor of 2 8x compared to the hardware graphics pipeline on a top of the line GPU. Our implementation is open sourced and available at http://code.google.com/p/cudaraster/