Abstract: A Hardware Architecture for Surface Splatting
We present a novel architecture for hardware-accelerated rendering
of point primitives. Our pipeline implements a refined version
of EWA splatting, a high quality method for antialiased rendering
of point sampled representations. A central feature of our design
is the seamless integration of the architecture into conventional,
OpenGL-like graphics pipelines so as to complement triangle-based
rendering. The specific properties of the EWA algorithm required
a variety of novel design concepts including a ternary depth test
and using an on-chip pipelined heap data structure for making the
memory accesses of splat primitives more coherent. In addition,
we developed a computationally stable evaluation scheme for
perspectively corrected splats. We implemented our architecture both
on reconfigurable FPGA boards and as an ASIC prototype, and we
integrated it into an OpenGL-like software implementation. Our
evaluation comprises a detailed performance analysis using scenes
of varying complexity.