Hardware accelerated rendering of antialiasing using a modified a-buffer algorithm
Stephanie Winner, Mike Kelley, Brent Pease, Bill Rivard, Alex Yen · 1997
one pass per subpixel sample) through the hardware rendering pipeline.The resulting image is very high quality, but the performance degrades in proportion to the number of subpixel samples used by the filter function.This paper describes algorithms for accelerating antialiasing in 3D graphics through low-cost custom hardware.The rendering architecture employs a multiple-pass algorithm to perform front-to-back hidden surface removal and shading.Coverage mask evaluation is used to composite objects in 3D.The key advantage of this approach is that antialiasing requires no additional memory and decreases rendering performance by only 30-40% for typical images.The system is image partition based and is scalable to satisfy a wide range of performance and cost constraints.