High Performance Graphics (2014) Jonathan Ragan-Kelley and Ingo Wald (Editors) Streaming G-Buffer Compression for Multi-Sample Anti-Aliasing

Figure 1: Our streaming compression algorithm reduces the memory usage and shading costs associated with multi-sample anti-aliasing (MSAA) coupled to deferred shading. Here, a scene rendered with our algorithm using 8x MSAA (left) reduces memory usage by 50 % and total running time by 30 % when compared to an optimized deferred shading implementation. In most cases we shade once per pixel (right) even when multiple geometric primitives cover it. We present a novel lossy compression algorithm for G-buffers that enables deferred shading applications with high visibility sampling rates. Our streaming compression method operates in a single geometry rendering pass with a fixed, but scalable, amount of per pixel memory. We demonstrate reduced memory requirements and improved performance, with minimal impact on image quality. 1