dc.contributor.author	Sathe, Rahul	en_US
dc.contributor.author	Akenine-Möller, Tomas	en_US
dc.contributor.editor	B. Bickel and T. Ritschel	en_US
dc.date.accessioned	2015-04-15T08:32:43Z
dc.date.available	2015-04-15T08:32:43Z
dc.date.issued	2015	en_US
dc.description.abstract	Multi-sample anti-aliasing is a popular technique for reducing geometric aliasing (jagged edges) and is supported in all modern graphics processors. With multi-sampling anti-aliasing, visibility and depth are sampled more than once per pixel, while shading is done only once per pixel per primitive. Although this significantly reduces the appearance of jagged edges around object boundaries, the image quality improvement in non-silhouette regions is hardly noticeable. We propose a hardware unit, called the pixel merge unit, which is located just after the early depth test unit but before the pixel shader. Our unit attempts to reduce the shading rate to once per pixel per group of connected primitives covering a pixel using a novel merging strategy. We demonstrate up to 15% reduction in pixel shader executions. Given the simple implementation that we propose, this is a substantial reduction.	en_US
dc.description.sectionheaders	Rendering and Images	en_US
dc.description.seriesinformation	EG 2015 - Short Papers	en_US
dc.identifier.doi	10.2312/egsh.20151013	en_US
dc.identifier.pages	53-56	en_US
dc.identifier.uri	https://doi.org/10.2312/egsh.20151013	en_US
dc.publisher	The Eurographics Association	en_US
dc.title	Pixel Merge Unit	en_US

Pixel Merge Unit