The Realtime Rendering Based On Sort-First Architecture

In these days, the graphics applications are becoming popular in many fields, such as science explorer, engineering design, mechanical manufacture and gaming entertainment. But the increasing complexity of the scenes has caused lots of problems.When the users' requests towards rending rates, display rates, image quality and access efficiency get more and more critical, the computer's response will be slow and the networks always can not sustain the efficiency on edge of crashing.With the quick development of computer networks and the prevalence of personal computers in recent years, more and more people are trying to implement computer graphics parallel rendering using interconnecting PCs and getting obvious progress. Further more the parallel rending technology can be integrated with the technology of high-resolution huge screen and becomes the background of seamless conjunction.A parallel rending system based on PC cluster is proposed in this thesis. This system consists of PCs, Ethernet and commodity graphics accelerators. A hierarchical level of detail policy is proposed at the same time to handle very huge virtual scene.Based on an existing prototype, the system fully takes advantage of all kinds of real-time rendering technology to improve the efficiency. The system can handle high complexity in relatively short time through adjusting each object's level of detail dynamically .The system in this thesis is based on Sort-First architecture and adopts the scene resource Retained-Mode. As a complete unit, critical real-time rendering technology such as level of detail is applied. That is to say the system decimates the models, synchronizes these models at the same time and adopts hierarchical shader policy. Another unique characteristic is using OpenGL Shading Language, which takes use of the computing power of the Graphics Processing Unit to alleviate the load on CPU to accelerate the parallel rendering efficiency.The practical meaning of the system is very evident. In addition to the scalability and hardware-independence, the system can balance the relation between image quality and real-time frame rates, achieving desirable rendering effect.