Software Shaders in Interactive Environments Using Relief Impostors

Abstract. This work presents an architecture for real-time visualization, which is able to render a set of 3D objects by using the CPU idle time. The objects being rendered are sent to the graphics pipeline as relief impostors. Their depth maps are used to apply 3D image-warping operations in order to prolong the life cycle of the synthesized images. While an image is within the graphics pipeline the CPU idle time is used to generate additional necessary images. With this method, it is possible to render images with special illumination models and effects that are impossible or unsuitable to be implemented with the shaders of the available graphics cards