Abstract: A system and method is disclosed for resolving visual priority among coincident primitives for a computer graphics system. The method can include the operation of classifying primitives within a computer generated scene into an ordinary group and one or more coincident groups according to each primitive's visual depth set comprising a depth value, a group value, and a layer value. The primitives within the ordinary group can be rendered according to their depth value. The primitives within the same coincident group can be rendered according to their layer value.

Abstract: A method is disclosed for rendering a volumetric obscurant in a computer generated graphical image. The method can include the operation of defining a polygon template as a first surface of the volumetric obscurant comprising pixels and sub-pixels. A further operation can be spreading a depth of the sub-pixels for pixels in the polygon template to create a thickness in the volumetric obscurant. Finally, another operation can be modulating a depth density of the sub-pixels to vary the distances between the sub-pixels in the volumetric obscurant.

Abstract: A method and apparatus for rendering a real-time synthetic environment on a computer display. A hidden surface removal technique is provided which combines an efficient pixel rendering architecture with a simplified modeling process. Specifically, the computer pixel graphics hardware processing load is balanced against a software geometric load to obtain optimum rendering performance by utilizing a "full" buffer in combination with adaptations of the z-Buffer and priority-list algorithms.