Distributed rendering of interactive soft shadows

Authors:
M. Isard;M. Shand;A. Heirich
Affiliations:
Compaq Computer Corporation and Microsoft Research;Compaq Computer Corporation;Compaq Computer Corporation
Venue:
EGPGV '02 Proceedings of the Fourth Eurographics Workshop on Parallel Graphics and Visualization
Year:
2002

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Abstract

Recently several distributed rendering systems have been developed which exploit a cluster of commodity computers by connecting host graphics cards over a fast network to form a compositing pipeline. This paper introduces a new algorithm which takes advantage of the programmable compositing operators in these systems to improve the performance of rendering multiple shadow-maps, for example to produce approximate soft shadows. With an nVidia GeForce4 Ti graphics card the new algorithm reduces the number of required render nodes by nearly a factor of four compared with a naive approach. We show results that yield interactive-speed rendering of 32 shadows on a 9-node Sepia2a distributed rendering cluster.