Visibility Driven Rasterization

We present a new visibility driven rasterization scheme that significantly increases the rendering performance of modern graphic subsystems. Instead of rasterizing, texturing, lighting, and depth-testing each individual pixel, we introduce a two-level visibility mask within the rasterization stage which facilitates the removal of groups of pixels and triangles from rasterization and subsequent pipeline stages. Local visibility information is stored within the visibility mask that is updated several times during the generation of a frame. The update can easily be accomplished by extending already available (in hardware) occlusion culling mechanisms (i.e. those of HP and SGI), where it is possible to integrate the additional functionality without any additional delay cycles. In addition to these existing hardware based occlusion culling approaches—which cull only geometry contained in bounding volumes determined as occluded—we are able to significantly accelerate the rendering of the geometry determined as visible. However, our approach does not specifically rely on such occlusion culling hardware. The proposed new rasterization scheme is well suited for hardware implementation, can easily be integrated into low-cost rasterizers, and its scalability can vary upon available chip real estate. Only incremental modifications of modern graphics subsystems are required to achieve a significant improvement in rendering performance.