Compressed Multisampling for Efficient Hardware Edge Antialiasing

Today's hardware graphics accelerators incorporate techniques to antialias edges and minimize geometry-related sampling artifacts. Two such techniques, brute force supersampling and multisampling, increase the sampling rate by rasterizing the triangles in a larger antialiasing buffer that is then filtered down to the size of the framebuffer. The sampling rate is proportional to the number of subsamples in the antialiasing buffer and, when no compression is used, to the memory it occupies. In turn, a larger antialiasing buffer implies an increase in bandwidth, one of the limiting resources for today's applications. In this paper we propose a mechanism to compress the antialiasing buffer and limit the bandwidth requirements while maintaining higher sampling rates. The usual framebuffer-related functions of OpenGL are supported: alpha blending, stenciling, color operations, and color masking. The technique is scalable, allowing for user-specified maximal and minimal sampling ra...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2004
• Where: GRAPHICSINTERFACE
• Authors: Philippe Beaudoin, Pierre Poulin
• Keywords: Antialiasing Buffer, GRAPHICSINTERFACE 2004, GRAPHICSINTERFACE 2007, Larger Antialiasing Buffer, Sampling Rate