CUDA renderer: a programmable graphics pipeline

Abstract

Modern GPUs provide gradually increasing programmability on vertex shader, geometry shader and fragment shader in the past decade. However, many classical problems such as order-independent transparency (OIT), occlusion culling have not yet been efficiently solved using the traditional graphics pipeline. The main reason is that the behavior of the current stage of the pipeline is hard to be determined due to the unpredictable future data. Since the rasterization and blending stage are still largely fixed functions on chip, previous improvements on these problems always require hardware modifications thus remain on the theoretical level. In this paper we propose CUDA Renderer, a fully programmable graphics pipeline using compute unified device architecture (CUDA) [NVIDIA 2008] which can completely run on current graphics hardware. Our experimental results have demonstrated significant speedup to traditional graphics pipeline especially on OIT. We believe many other problems can also benefit from this flexible architecture.