Interruptible rendering

  • Authors:
  • J. Cliff Woolley;David Luebke;Ben Watson

  • Affiliations:
  • University of Virginia;University of Virginia;Northwestern University

  • Venue:
  • ACM SIGGRAPH 2002 conference abstracts and applications
  • Year:
  • 2002

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Abstract

Interruptible rendering is a novel approach to the fidelity-versus-performance tradeoff ubiquitous in real-time rendering. Interruptible rendering unifies spatial error, caused by rendering coarse approximations for speed, and temporal error, caused by the delay imposed by rendering, into a single image-space error metric. The heart of this approach is a progressive rendering framework that renders a coarse image into the back buffer and continuously refines it, while tracking the temporal error. When the temporal error exceeds the spatial error caused by coarse rendering, further refinement is pointless and the image is displayed. We discuss the requirements for a rendering algorithm to be suitable for interruptible use, and describe one such algorithm based on hierarchical splatting. Interruptible rendering provides a low-latency, self-tuning approach to interactive rendering. Interestingly, it also leads to a "one-and-a-half buffered" approach that renders sometimes to the back buffer and sometimes to the front buffer.