Quality Issues of Hardware-Accelerated High-Quality Filtering on PC Graphics Hardware

This paper summarizes several quality issues of an approach for high-quality filtering with arbitrary filter kernels on PC graphics hardware that has been presented previously. Since this method uses multiple rendering passes, it is prone to precision and range problems related to the limited precision and range of intermediate computations and the color buffer. This is especially crucial on consumer-level 3D graphics hardware, where usually only eight bits are stored per color component. We estimate the accumulated error of several error sources, such as filter kernel quantization and discretization, precision of intermediate computations, and precision and range of intermediate results stored in the color buffer. We also describe two approaches for improving precision at the expense of a higher number of rendering passes. The first approach preserves higher internal precision over multiple passes that are forced to store intermediate results in the less-precise color buffer. The...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2003
• Where: WSCG
• Authors: Markus Hadwiger, Helwig Hauser, Torsten Möller
• Keywords: Color Buffer, Graphics Hardware, Intermediate Computations, WSCG 2003