Z-fighting Aware Depth Peeling

Andreas Vasilakis and Ioannis Fudos


SIGGRAPH Posters 2011: 77


Abstract

Efficient capturing of the entire topological and geometric information of a 3D scene is an important feature in many graphics applications for rendering multi-fragment effects. Example applications include order independent transparency, volume rendering, CSG rendering, trimming, and shadow mapping all of which require operations on more than one fragment per pixel location. An influential multi-pass technique is front-to-back (F2B) depth peeling which works by peeling off a single fragment per pass and by exploiting the GPU capabilities to accumulate the final result. The major drawback of this peeling algorithm is that fragment layers with depth identical to the fragment depth detected in the previous pass are discarded and so not peeled. Stencil Routed A-buffer (SRAB) treats z-fighting for sorted fragments. However, SRAB is limited by the resolution of the stencil buffer and is incompatible with hardware supported multisample antialiasing. k-buffer processes k fragments in a single pass, thus performing up to k times faster than F2B. k-buffer suffers from read-modify-write hazards and needs a small fixed amount of additional memory which is allocated in the form of multi render target buffers. Similarly to SRAB, k-buffer requires a pre-sorting of the primitives of the scene to treat correctly up to k Z-fighting fragments. In this work, we introduce a novel technique for commodity graphics hardware that completely treats Z-fighting by extending F2B depth peeling with the overhead of one extra geometry pass. To speed up depth peeling at scenes with large number of layers with same depth values, we also propose an approximate z-fighting free depth peeling technique that combines the F2B and the k-buffer algorithms. Extended Abstract   BibTeX
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ACM DL Author-ize serviceZ-fighting aware depth peeling
Andreas A. Vasilakis, Ioannis Fudos
SIGGRAPH '11 ACM SIGGRAPH 2011 Posters, 2011

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