Abstract: A method and system for producing an image to be displayed are disclosed herein. The image includes a plurality of pixels. An example of the method includes dedicating a fixed amount of memory to store a data structure for a pixel of plurality of pixels. The method also includes building a visibility function and determining a partial color sum for each fragment of the plurality of fragments. A pixel color is determined using the visibility function and the partial color sums.

Abstract: In order to efficiently backface cull rendering primitives during computer graphics rendering, it is important to be sure that the rendering primitives to be culled are guaranteed to be backfacing even if the primitives are moving or are undergoing defocus blur. Therefore, we derive conservative tests that determine if a moving and defocused triangle is backfacing over an entire time interval and over the area of a lens. In addition, we present tests for the special cases of only motion blur and only depth of field.

Abstract: The problem of generating high quality images with a rendering pipeline based on decoupled sampling may be addressed by generating non-extrapolated shading locations and by determining improved texture filtering footprints. This may be accomplished by performing shading at the center of a bounding box that bounds mapped shading samples.

Abstract: Representing a transparent object as a summation of substantially zero step functions of a visibility curve for the object. An array may be used to store nodes to represent the visibility function. The size of the array may be limited to be storable within a memory of an on-chip graphics processing unit.

Abstract: A dynamic volumetric medium, such as hair, fog, or smoke, may be represented, for purposes of shadow mapping, by transmittance versus depth data for that medium. In one embodiment, the representation may take the form of a plot of transmittance versus depth, with nodes where the transmittance changes non-live linearly with respect of depth into the medium. The number of nodes in the representation may be reduced to reduce memory footprint and to enable the storage of the representation on the same chip doing the shadow mapping. In some embodiments, the number of nodes may be reduced, one node at a time, by removing the node whose underlying trapezoid has the least area of all the remaining nodes.

Abstract: In order to efficiently backface cull rendering primitives during computer graphics rendering, it is important to be sure that the rendering primitives to be culled are guaranteed to be backfacing even if the primitives are moving or are undergoing defocus blur. Therefore, we derive conservative tests that determine if a moving and defocused triangle is backfacing over an entire time interval and over the area of a lens. In addition, we present tests for the special cases of only motion blur and only depth of field.

Abstract: Shadow map partitions may be automatically placed based on the location or concentration of sample data depth in eye space. An initial positioning for the partitions may be determined based on user specified budgets for number of partitions, computation time, or memory utilization, in some embodiments. The initial positioning may be refined using a clustering algorithm in some cases.