A high-performance software graphics pipeline architecture for the GPU

In this paper, we present a real-time graphics pipeline implemented entirely in software on a modern GPU. As opposed to previous work, our approach features a fully-concurrent, multi-stage, streaming design with dynamic load balancing, capable of operating efficiently within bounded memory. We address issues such as primitive order, vertex reuse, and screen-space derivatives of dependent variables, which are essential to real-world applications, but have largely been ignored by comparable work in the past. The power of a software approach lies in the ability to tailor the graphics pipeline to any given application. In exploration of this potential, we design and implement four novel pipeline modifications. Evaluation of the performance of our approach on more than 100 real-world scenes collected from video games shows rendering speeds within one order of magnitude of the hardware graphics pipeline as well as significant improvements over previous work, not only in terms of capabilities and performance, but also robustness.