A Hardware Architecture for Surface Splatting
ACM Transactions on Graphics (Proc. SIGGRAPH), August 2007
Point rendering system featuring an ASIC implementation
of our point rendering architecture. The system runs standalone,
independent from a host PC.
Abstract
We present a novel architecture for hardware-accelerated rendering
of point primitives. Our pipeline implements a refined version
of EWA splatting, a high quality method for antialiased rendering
of point sampled representations. A central feature of our design
is the seamless integration of the architecture into conventional,
OpenGL-like graphics pipelines so as to complement triangle-based
rendering. The specific properties of the EWA algorithm required
a variety of novel design concepts including a ternary depth test
and using an on-chip pipelined heap data structure for making the
memory accesses of splat primitives more coherent. In addition,
we developed a computationally stable evaluation scheme for perspectively
corrected splats. We implemented our architecture both
on reconfigurable FPGA boards and as an ASIC prototype, and we
integrated it into an OpenGL-like software implementation. Our
evaluation comprises a detailed performance analysis using scenes
of varying complexity.
Paper
Video
- AVI file (640x480, 3:41, 30 MB)
Citation
Tim Weyrich, Simon Heinzle, Timo Aila, Daniel B. Fasnacht, Stephan Oetiker, Mario Botsch, Cyril Flaig, Simon Mall, Kaspar Rohrer, Norbert Felber, Hubert Kaeslin, and Markus Gross.
"A Hardware Architecture for Surface Splatting."
ACM Transactions on Graphics (Proc. SIGGRAPH) 26(3), August 2007.
BibTeX
@article{Weyrich:2007:AHA,
author = "Tim Weyrich and Simon Heinzle and Timo Aila and Daniel B. Fasnacht and
Stephan Oetiker and Mario Botsch and Cyril Flaig and Simon Mall
and Kaspar Rohrer and Norbert Felber and Hubert Kaeslin and
Markus Gross",
title = "A Hardware Architecture for Surface Splatting",
journal = "ACM Transactions on Graphics (Proc. SIGGRAPH)",
year = "2007",
month = aug,
volume = "26",
number = "3"
}