Simple models of the impact of overlap in bucket rendering

Abstract

Bucket rendering is a technique in which the framebuffer is subdivided into coherent regions that are rendered independently. The primary benefits of bucket rendering are the decrease in the size of the working set of framebuffer memory required during rendering and the possibility of processing multiple regions in parallel. The drawback are the cost of computing the regions overlapped by each triangle and the redundant work required in processing triangles multiple times when they overlap multiple regions. Mathematical models, instrumentation, and trace driven simulation were used to evaluate the impact of overlap.