A Comparison of Parallel Compositing Techniques on Shared Memory Architectures  Erik Reinhard and Chuck Hansen

Erik Reinhard and Chuck Hansen, "A Comparison of Parallel Compositing Techniques on Shared Memory Architectures", Accepted for the Eurographics Workshop on Parallel Graphics and Visualisation, Girona, Spain, September 2000.

Parallel compositing techniques have traditionally focused on dis-tributed memory architectures with communication of pixel values usually being the main bottleneck. On shared memory architectures, communication is han-dled through memory accesses, obviating the need for explicit communication steps. Shared memory architectures with multiple graphics accelerators provide the capability for parallel rendering while combining the partial results from mul-tiple graphics adaptors requires compositing. For this reason, in this paper shared memory architectures are considered for compositing operations. A number of previously introduced parallel compositing algorithms are compared on a shared memory machine, including the binary swap and parallel pipeline techniques.

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