1 Comparison of Sort-First, Sort-Middle, and Sort-Last Graphics Rendering on a Cluster of Computers

The ability to render photo-realistic images in real time remains to be something that has yet to be implemented. Given today’s hardware technology, the computations involved with rendering highly complex graphics, is simply impossible without some kind of parallelism between processors. With hardware becoming cheaper all the time, and the rapid advancements made in the technology of networking, parallelism between graphics rendering systems seems to be the most feasible method (extremely high-end systems do exist, however the cost is astronomical). One can only imagine the possibilities that such rendering would allow in scientific research, not to mention multimedia applications. This paper is a survey of three architectures, sort-first, sort-middle, and sort-last that attempt to provide a feasible way of rendering graphics in parallel on a cluster of computers. In addition there is an examination of two algorithms employing these architectures