A Compressed Depth Cache
By Magnus Andersson, Jacob Munkberg, Tomas Akenine-Möller
Intel Corporation, Lund University
In this paper, we derive compact representations of the depth function for a triangle undergoing motion or defocus blur. Unlike a static primitive, where the depth function is planar, the depth function is a rational function in time and the lens parameters. Furthermore, we show how these compact depth functions can be used to design an efficient depth buffer compressor/decompressor, which significantly lowers total depth buffer bandwidth usage for a range of test scenes. In addition, our compressor/decompressor is simpler in the number of operations needed to execute, which makes our algorithm more amenable for hardware implementation than previous methods.
Read the preprint paper: Stochastic Depth Buffer Compression using Generalized Plane Encoding [PDF 4.8MB]
Citation: Andersson, Munkberg, and Akenine-Möller, Stochastic Depth Buffer Compression using Generalized Plane Encoding, Computer Graphics Forum (Eurographics), vol. 32, no. 2, 2013.