Tiled polygon traversal using half-plane edge functions
Joel McCormack, Robert J. McNamara · 2000
Existing techniques for traversing a polygon generate fragments one (or more) rows or columns at a time. (A fragment is all the information needed to paint one pixel of the polygon.) This order is non-optimal for many operations. For example, most frame buffers are tiled into rectangular pages, and there is a cost associated with accessing a different page. Pixel processing is more efficient if all fragments of a polygon on one page are generated before any fragments on a different page. Similarly, texture caches have reduced miss rates if fragments are generated in tiles (and even tiles of tiles) whose size depends upon the cache organization.