High Quality Hardware Line Antialiasing

Scott R. Nelson
Sun Microsystems Computer Company

This paper appears in issue Volume 2, Number 1.
Purchase this issue from the akpeters.com web site.

Abstract

The graphics community has understood line antialiasing reasonably well for many years. Many papers have been written on the subject, but none of them have offered a complete solution. This paper explains all of the details of a well behaved hardware algorithm used in the SparcStation ZX that, although imperfect, works very well in practice. The paper discusses tradeoffs at each point and the reasoning that went into the decisions that were made.

Author Information

Scott R. Nelson, Sun Microsystems Computer Company, 2550 Garcia Avenue MPK14-202, Mountain View, CA 94043 scott.nelson@eng.sun.com

Source Code

Downloadable tar file contains C source code and a README file, as well as readme.mac, readme.unix and readme.wintel platform-specific notes.

Revision history:

8 Jul 1997
- Program creation. Thanks to Sanjay Gupta for the Unix X11 display code.
29 Jul 1997
- Removed nested comment (compiler warning) from aadraw.c.
  Added Windows display code, thanks to Chris Babcock.

Updated Contact Information

The author's current email address is Scott.R.Nelson@intel.com. (updated Feb 11, 1999)

BibTeX Entry

@article{Nelson97,
  author = "Scott R. Nelson",
  title = "High Quality Hardware Line Antialiasing",
  journal = "journal of graphics tools",
  volume = "2",
  number = "1",
  pages = "29-46",
  year = "1997",
}