An Improved Triangle Encoding Scheme for Cached Tessellation

Abstract

With the recent advances in real-time rendering that were achieved by embracing software rasterization, the interest in alternative solutions for other fixed-function pipeline stages rises. In this paper, we revisit a recently presented software approach for cached tessellation, which compactly encodes and stores triangles in GPU memory. While the proposed technique is both efficient and versatile, we show that the original encoding is suboptimal and provide an alternative scheme that acts as a drop-in replacement. As shown in our evaluation, the proposed modifications can yield performance gains of 40% and more.