Dynamic Algorithms for Sorting Primitives Among Screen-Space Tiles in a Parallel Rendering System

Based on the recent improvements in the price/performance of PC-based graphics accelerators, it is compelling to consider approaches that combine multiple PCs together into a high performance, high resolution, low cost parallel rendering system. We are investigating sort-first approaches to build such a system in which one or more client PCs distribute 3D graphics primitives to multiple server PCs that render images for separate 2D tiles for projection on a display surface. A fundamental challenge in implementing such a system is developing a method to classify 3D graphics primitives according to their overlaps with the 2D screenspace tiles so that every server PC is not required to process every 3D primitive. In this paper, we describe several overlap classification algorithms based on different bounding volume approximations, different transformation sequences, different primitive aggregation methods, and different primitive sizes. We built a prototype sort-first system with one clie..