Real-Time Rendering Techniques with Hardware Tessellation
Volume 34 (2015), Number x pp. 0–24 COMPUTER GRAPHICS forum Real-time Rendering Techniques with Hardware Tessellation M. Nießner1 and B. Keinert2 and M. Fisher1 and M. Stamminger2 and C. Loop3 and H. Schäfer2 1Stanford University 2University of Erlangen-Nuremberg 3Microsoft Research Abstract Graphics hardware has been progressively optimized to render more triangles with increasingly flexible shading. For highly detailed geometry, interactive applications restricted themselves to performing transforms on fixed geometry, since they could not incur the cost required to generate and transfer smooth or displaced geometry to the GPU at render time. As a result of recent advances in graphics hardware, in particular the GPU tessellation unit, complex geometry can now be generated on-the-fly within the GPU’s rendering pipeline. This has enabled the generation and displacement of smooth parametric surfaces in real-time applications. However, many well- established approaches in offline rendering are not directly transferable due to the limited tessellation patterns or the parallel execution model of the tessellation stage. In this survey, we provide an overview of recent work and challenges in this topic by summarizing, discussing, and comparing methods for the rendering of smooth and highly-detailed surfaces in real-time. 1. Introduction Hardware tessellation has attained widespread use in computer games for displaying highly-detailed, possibly an- Graphics hardware originated with the goal of efficiently imated, objects. In the animation industry, where displaced rendering geometric surfaces. GPUs achieve high perfor- subdivision surfaces are the typical modeling and rendering mance by using a pipeline where large components are per- primitive, hardware tessellation has also been identified as a formed independently and in parallel.
[Show full text]