The Deferred Accumulation Buffer

Patrick S. McCormick
Los Alamos National Laboratory

Edward Angel
The University of New Mexico

This paper appears in issue Volume 4, Number 3.
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Abstract

A well-known disadvantage of using the Z-buffer algorithm for medium-quality rendering is the overhead associated with shading, shadowing, and texturing pixels that do not contribute to the final image. This problem may be avoided by deferring shading calculations until the end of the rendering pipeline. In this paper, we review two approaches to deferred shading, discuss how to handle transparency, and then extend these ideas to implement a deferred accumulation buffer.

Author Information

Patrick S. McCormick, Los Alamos National Laboratory, Advanced Computing Lab, MS B287, Los Alamos, CA 87545 pat@acl.lanl.gov

Charles Hansen, The University of Utah, Dept of Computer Science, Merrill Engineering Building, Salt Lake City, UT 84112 hansen@cs.utah.edu

Edward Angel, The University of New Mexico, Computer Science Department, Albuquerque, NM 87131 angel@cs.unm.edu

BibTeX Entry

@article{McCormickHansenAngel99,
  author = "Patrick S. McCormick and Charles Hansen and Edward Angel",
  title = "The Deferred Accumulation Buffer",
  journal = "journal of graphics tools",
  volume = "4",
  number = "3",
  pages = "35-46",
  year = "1999",
}