Similar Techniques
A similar principle is employed in tiled rendering (most famously the PowerVR 3D chip); that is, primitives are sorted into screen space, then rendered in fast on-chip memory, one tile at a time. The Dreamcast provided a mode for rasterizing one row of tiles at a time for direct raster scanout, saving the need for a complete framebuffer, somewhat in the spirit of hardware scanline rendering.
Some software rasterizers use 'span buffering' (or 'coverage buffering'), in which a list of sorted, clipped spans are stored in scanline buckets. Primitives would be successively added to this datastructure, before rasterizing only the visible pixels in a final stage.
Read more about this topic: Scanline Rendering
Famous quotes containing the words similar and/or techniques:
“Our ancestors were savages. The story of Romulus and Remus being suckled by a wolf is not a meaningless fable. The founders of every state which has risen to eminence have drawn their nourishment and vigor from a similar wild source. It was because the children of the Empire were not suckled by the wolf that they were conquered and displaced by the children of the northern forests who were.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The techniques of opening conversation are universal. I knew long ago and rediscovered that the best way to attract attention, help, and conversation is to be lost. A man who seeing his mother starving to death on a path kicks her in the stomach to clear the way, will cheerfully devote several hours of his time giving wrong directions to a total stranger who claims to be lost.”
—John Steinbeck (1902–1968)