Parallel rendering: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 12:37, 21 July 2006

Revision as of 19:53, 11 August 2006

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Traditional parallel rendering is a great example of what is meant by "embarrassingly parallel" in that the frames to be rendered are distributed amongst the available compute nodes. For instance, one frame is rendered on one compute node. Multiple frames can be processed because there are multiple nodes. A truly parallel process can distribute a frame across multiple nodes using a tightly coupled cross communication methodology to process frames by orders of magnitude faster. In this way, a full-rendering job consisting of multiple frames can be edited in real-time enabling designers to do better work faster.

In interactive parallel rendering, there are different approaches of distributing the rendering work, which have different advantages and disadvantages. Sort-first rendering decomposes the final view in screen space, that is, each contributercontributor renders a 2D tile of the final view. This mode has a limited scalability due to the parallel overhead caused by objects rendered on multiple tiles. Sort-last rendering on the other hand decomposes the rendered database across all rendering units, and recombines the partially rendered frames. This modes scales the rendering very well, but the recomposition step is expensive due to the amount of pixel data processed during recomposition. DPlex rendering distributes full, alternating frames to the individual rendering nodes. It scales very well, but increases the latency between user input and final display, which is often irritating for the user. Stereo decomposition is used for immersive applications, where the individual eye passes are rendered by different rendering units. Passive stereo systems are a typical example for this mode.

Parallel rendering can be used in graphics intensive applications to visualize the data more efficiently by adding resources like more machines.

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[[Category:Distributed computing]]

[[Category:Visual effects]]

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