A single-pass antialiased rasterization processor

Abstract

Antialiased is one of challenging problems to be solved for the high fidelity image synthesis in 3D graphics. In this paper a rasterization processor which is capable of single-pass full-screen antialiasing is presented. To implement a H/W accelerated single-pass antialiased rasterization processor at the reasonable H/W cost and minimized processing performance degradation. our work is mainly focused on the efficient H/W implementation of a modified version of the A-buffer algorithm. For the efficient handling of partial-pixel fragments of the rasterization phase, a new partial-pixel-merging scheme and a simple and efficient new dynamic memory management scheme are proposed. For the final blending of partial-pixels without loss of generality, a parallel subpixel blender is introduced. To study the feasibility of the proposed rasterization processor as a practical rasterization processor, a prototype processor has been designed using a 0.35 mum EML technology. It operates 100 Mhz @3.3 V and has the rendering performance from 25M to 80M pixel-fragments/sec depending on the scene complexity.