Efficient Partitioning of Fragment Shaders for Multiple-Output Hardware

Foley, Tim; Houston, Mike; Hanrahan, Pat

Efficient Partitioning of Fragment Shaders for Multiple-Output Hardware

Files

045-054.pdf (261.17 KB)

Date

2004

Authors

Foley, Tim
Houston, Mike
Hanrahan, Pat

Publisher

The Eurographics Association

Abstract

Partitioning fragment shaders into multiple rendering passes is an effective technique for virtualizing shading resource limits in graphics hardware. The Recursive Dominator Split (RDS) algorithm is a polynomial-time algorithm for partitioning fragment shaders for real-time rendering that has been shown to generate efficient partitions. RDS does not, however, work for shaders with multiple outputs, and does not optimize for hardware with support for multiple render targets. We present Merging Recursive Dominator Split (MRDS), an extension of the RDS algorithm to shaders with arbitrary numbers of outputs which can efficiently utilize hardware support for multiple render targets, as well as a new cost metric for evaluating the quality of multipass partitions on modern consumer graphics hardware. We demonstrate that partitions generated by our algorithm execute more efficiently than those generated by RDS alone, and that our cost model is effective in predicting the relative performance of multipass partitions.

        @inproceedings{:10.2312/EGGH/EGGH04/045-054
,
booktitle = {Graphics Hardware
},
editor = {Tomas Akenine-Moeller and Michael McCool
},
title = {{Efficient Partitioning of Fragment Shaders for Multiple-Output Hardware
}},
author = {Foley, Tim and 
Houston, Mike and 
Hanrahan, Pat
},
year = {2004
},
publisher = {The Eurographics Association
},
ISSN = {1727-3471
},
ISBN = {3-905673-15-0
},
DOI = {/10.2312/EGGH/EGGH04/045-054
}
}