SRAA by NVIDIA

http://research.nvidia.com/publication/subpixel-reconstruction-antialiasing

“Subpixel Reconstruction Antialiasing”

Matthäus G. Chajdas (Technische Universität München and NVIDIA), Morgan McGuire (NVIDIA), David Luebke (NVIDIA), in i3D, February 2011

Subpixel Reconstruction Antialiasing (SRAA) combines single-pixel (1x) shading with subpixel visibility to create antialiased images without increasing the shading cost.

SRAA targets deferred-shading renderers, which cannot use multisample antialiasing.

SRAA operates as a post-process on a rendered image with superresolution depth and normal buffers, so it can be incorporated into an existing renderer without modifying the shaders.

In this way SRAA resembles Morphological Antialiasing (MLAA), but the new algorithm can better respect geometric boundaries and has fixed runtime independent of scene and image complexity.

SRAA benefits shading-bound applications.

For example, our implementation evaluates SRAA in 1.8 ms (1280×720) to yield antialiasing quality comparable to 4-16x shading.

Thus SRAA would produce a net speedup over supersampling for applications that spend 1 ms or more on shading; for comparison, most modern games spend 5-10 ms shading.

We also describe simplifications that increase performance by reducing quality.

所以SRAA算是MLAA的改良版、可以在deferred shading等無法使用MSAA的場合取代SSAA。

速度也較快,可以在Shader吃重的場合透過置換的方式提供可接受的AA品質,帶來加速。

Ivy Bridge的stack memory

http://www.semiaccurate.com/2010/12/29/intel-puts-gpu-memory-ivy-bridge/

Intel puts GPU memory on Ivy Bridge

其實以爭取頻寬的角度來講,MCM是很重要的手段;不過Ivy Bridge畢竟是CPU,純粹 for frame buffer的1GB memory是蠻匪夷所思的,應該是個stack memory有所突破、頻寬相當大而可資所有元件利用的L4 cache;只是GPU可以access到LL cache之故,就變成主要為GPU memory。

反之,stack memory並不是CPU only的東西,GPU用下去照樣獲益、甚至獲益更大,所以可以看到NVIDIA和AMD都有發展計畫,只是相信應該會比最早著手的Intel慢。

總之,壓路機轟然走過….只要GMA team能繼續長進下去,Ivy Bridge的GPU應該還是有可看之處。