Real-time hybrid parallel rendering

Abstract

In computer graphics, rendering is described as the process of converting a description of a scene to an image. When the scene is complex and high quality images are required, the rendering process becomes computationally demanding. To provide the satisfactory performance, real-time computing techniques must be developed. Although parallelism has been extensively used in computer graphics for a long time, its initial use was primarily in specialized applications. Today, parallel computing is used in commodity personal computers, and various software-based rendering systems have been developed for general purpose real-time systems. As the new GPUs released to the market, the available rendering performance increases constantly. Also more powerful multi-core CPUs that have enabled more exible and faster software-based graphics, such as real-time ray tracing. Despite this tremendous hardware development progress in rendering power, there will always be some applications that require distributed con gurations for rendering. In this thesis, I present a prototype solution consisting of a system that supports di erent rendering modules (e.g., rasterization, and ray tracing) and combine it with a distributed graphics processing. This thesis provides a general introduction to the subject of real-time rendering, covering both hardware and software aspects. The main focus is on the underlying concepts and the issues which arise in the design of real-time rendering algorithms and systems. Di erent types of parallelism and how they can be applied in rendering applications are examined. Concepts from parallel computing, such as data decomposition, task granularity, scalability, and load balancing, are considered in relation to the rendering problem. Also concepts from computer graphics, such as coherence, culling, and level of detail which have a signi cant impact on the structure of parallel rendering algorithms are explored.