An object-based parallel rendering system

Image composition architecture for polygon rendering is the most promising candidate for high performance. It does not suffer from any disadvantage of screen subdivision architecture (i.e., load imbalance and increased clipping time). However, in this architecture, the image composition operation cannot be overlapped with the calculation operation for computing an image and the memory requirement for local frame buffer is very large. The object based parallel rendering system (OBPRS) that is based on the image composition architecture is proposed and the objective of the OBPRS is to remove the disadvantages of the image composition architecture. According to the simulation results with a 64-renderer system, the OBPRS takes only about 80% of the rendering time of the image composition architecture. Also, it requires only 85% of the memory requirement for local frame buffer of the screen subdivision architecture. Thus the OBPRS turns out to be an effective system model, providing high performance to cost ratio.