Drawing triangles with CUDA

Question

I'm writing my own graphics library (yep, its homework:) and use cuda to do all rendering and calculations fast.

I have problem with drawing filled triangles. I wrote it such a way that one process draw one triangle. It works pretty fine when there are a lot of small triangles on the scene, but it breaks performance totally when triangles are big.

My idea is to do two passes. In first calculate only tab with information about scanlines (draw from here to there). This would be triangle per process calculation like in current algorithm. And in second pass really draw the scanlines with more than one process per triangle.

But will it be fast enough? Maybe there is some better solution?

Answer 1

You can check this blog: A Software Rendering Pipeline in CUDA. I don't think that's the optimal way to do it, but at least the author shares some useful sources.

Second, read this paper: A Programmable, Parallel Rendering Architecture. I think it's one of the most recent paper and it's also CUDA based.

If I had to do this, I would go with a Data-Parallel Rasterization Pipeline like in Larrabee (which is TBR) or even REYES and adapt it to CUDA:

http://www.ddj.com/architect/217200602 http://home.comcast.net/~tom_forsyth/larrabee/Standford%20Forsyth%20Larrabee%202010.zip (see the second part of the presentation)

http://graphics.stanford.edu/papers/mprast/