A Survey of Multifragment Rendering

Abstract

In the past few years, advances in graphics hardware have fuelled an explosion of research and development in the field of interactive and real‐time rendering in screen space. Following this trend, a rapidly increasing number of applications rely on multifragment rendering solutions to develop visually convincing graphics applications with dynamic content. The main advantage of these approaches is that they encompass additional rasterised geometry, by retaining more information from the fragment sampling domain, thus augmenting the visibility determination stage. With this survey, we provide an overview of and insight into the extensive, yet active research and respective literature on multifragment rendering. We formally present the multifragment rendering pipeline, clearly identifying the construction strategies, the core image operation categories and their mapping to the respective applications. We describe features and trade‐offs for each class of techniques, pointing out GPU optimisations and limitations and provide practical recommendations for choosing an appropriate method for each application. Finally, we offer fruitful context for discussion by outlining some existing problems and challenges as well as by presenting opportunities for impactful future research directions.

Comparative Analysis of Real-Time Global Illumination Techniques in Current Game Engines

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Z‐Thickness Blending: Effective Fragment Merging for Multi‐Fragment Rendering

“…Several approaches have been reported to efficiently achieve multi‐fragment rendering [VVP20], where handling a large number of fragments is the primary challenge. In GPU raster‐based graphics, such fragments concurrently enter the same pixel, resulting in heavy contention and depth ordering problems [Cra10,MCTB11].…”

“…In a recent survey on multi-fragment rendering [VVP20], the authors emphasized the need to develop encoding and decoding techniques to represent more fragment information with limited buffer capacity. They also discussed further directions for various visualization effects based on multi-fragment rendering.…”

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Hashed, binned A-buffer for real-time outlier removal and rendering of noisy point clouds

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