Perlin noise pixel shaders

  • Authors:
  • John C. Hart

  • Affiliations:
  • University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, Dept. of Computer Science, 1304 W. Springfield Ave., Urbana, IL

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the ACM SIGGRAPH/EUROGRAPHICS workshop on Graphics hardware
  • Year:
  • 2001

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Abstract

While working on a method for supporting real-time procedural solid texturing, we developed a general purpose multipass pixel shader to generate the Perlin noise function. We implemented this algorithm on SGI workstations using accelerated OpenGL PixelMap and PixelTransfer operations, achieving a rate of 2.5 Hz for a 256x256 image. We also implemented the noise algorithm on the NVidia GeForce2 using register combiners. Our register combiner implementation required 375 passes, but ran at 1.3 Hz. This exercise illustrated a variety of abilities and shortcomings of current graphics hardware. The paper concludes with an exploration of directions for expanding pixel shading hardware to further support iterative multipass pixel-shader applications.