A Hardware Architecture for Surface Splatting

We present a novel architecture for hardware-accelerated rendering of point primitives. Our pipeline implements a refined version of EWA splatting, a high quality method for antialiased rendering of point sampled representations. A central feature of our design is the seamless integration of the architecture into conventional, OpenGL-like graphics pipelines so as to complement triangle-based rendering. The specific properties of the EWA algorithm required a variety of novel design concepts including a ternary depth test and using an on-chip pipelined heap data structure for making the memory accesses of splat primitives more coherent. In addition, we developed a computationally stable evaluation scheme for perspectively corrected splats. We implemented our architecture both on reconfigurable FPGA boards and as an ASIC prototype, and we integrated it into an OpenGL-like software implementation. Our evaluation comprises a detailed performance analysis using scenes of varying complexity.

Authors

Tim Weyrich (ETH Zurich and Princeton University)
Simon Heinzle (ETH Zurich)
Daniel B. Fasnacht (ETH Zurich)
Stephan Oetiker (ETH Zurich)
Mario Botsch (ETH Zurich)
Cyril Flaig (ETH Zurich)
Simon Mall (ETH Zurich)
Kaspar Rohrer (ETH Zurich)
Norbert Felber (ETH Zurich)
Hubert Kaeslin (ETH Zurich)
Markus Gross (ETH Zurich)

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