Effective Pixel Rendering in Practice

Abstract

The graphics processing unit (GPU) has now become an integral part of our lives through both desktop and portable devices. Thanks to dedicated hardware, visualization has been significantly accelerated, softwares today only use the GPU for rasterization. As a result of this development, now we use only triangle-based rendering, and pixel-based image manipulations can only be performed using shaders. It can be stated that today’s GPU pipeline cannot provide the same flexibility as the previous software implementation. This paper discusses an efficient software implementation of pixel-based rasterization. After reviewing the current GPU-based drawing process, we will show how to access pixel level drawing in this environment. Finally, a more efficient storage and display format than the classic solution is presented, which performance far exceeds the previous solution.