S-buffer: Sparsity-aware Multi-fragment Rendering

Abstract

This work introduces S-buffer, an efficient and memory-friendly gpu-accelerated A-buffer architecture for multifragment rendering. Memory is organized into variable contiguous regions for each pixel, thus avoiding limitations set in linked-lists and fixed-array techniques. S-buffer exploits fragment distribution for precise allocation of the needed storage and pixel sparsity (empty pixel ratio) for computing the memory offsets for each pixel in a parallel fashion. An experimental comparative evaluation of our technique over previous multi-fragment rendering approaches in terms of memory and performance is provided.