GPU-accelerated high-quality hidden surface removal
Daniel Wexler, Larry Gritz, Eric Enderton, Jonathan Rice · 2005
High-quality off-line rendering requires many features not natively supported by current commodity graphics hardware: wide smooth filters, high sampling rates, order-independent transparency, spectral opacity, motion blur, depth of field. We present a GPU-based hidden-surface algorithm that implements all these features. The algorithm is Reyes-like but uses regular sampling and multiple passes. Transparency is implemented by depth peeling, made more efficient by opacity thresholding and a new method called z batches. We discuss performance and some design trade-offs. At high spatial sampling rates, our implementation is substantially faster than a CPU-only renderer for typical scenes.