Brunhaver, John S.Fatahalian, KayvonHanrahan, PatMichael Doggett and Samuli Laine and Warren Hunt2013-10-282013-10-282010978-3-905674-26-22079-8687https://doi.org/10.2312/EGGH/HPG10/001-009Current GPUs rasterize micropolygons (polygons approximately one pixel in size) inefficiently. Additionally, they do not natively support triangle rasterization with jittered sampling, defocus, or motion blur. We perform a microarchitectural study of fixed-function micropolygon rasterization using custom circuits. We present three rasterization designs: the first optimized for triangle micropolygons that are not blurred, a second for stochastic rasterization of micropolygons with motion and defocus blur, and third that is a hybrid combination of the two. Our designs achieve high area and power efficiency by using low-precision operations and rasterizing pairs of adjacent triangles in parallel. We demonstrate optimized designs synthesized in a 45 nm process showing that a micropolygon rasterization unit with a throughput of 3 billion micropolygons per second would consume 2.9 W and occupy 4.1 mm2 which is 0.77 percent of the die area of a GeForce GTX 480 GPU.Categories and Subject Descriptors (according to ACM CCS): I.3.1 [Computer Graphics]: Graphics processors I.3.7 Three-Dimensional Graphics and Realism