GPU-Accelerated High-Quality Hidden Surface Removal

Abstract

High-quality off-line rendering requires many features not natively supported by current commodity graphics hardware: wide smooth filters, high sampling rates, order-independent transparency, spectral opacity, motion blur, depth of field. We present a GPU-based hidden-surface algorithm that implements all these features. The algorithm is Reyeslike but uses regular sampling and multiple passes. Transparency is implemented by depth peeling, made more efficient by opacity thresholding and a new method called z batches. We discuss performance and some design trade-offs. At high spatial sampling rates, our implementation is substantially faster than a CPU-only renderer for typical scenes.