Aggregate G-Buffer Anti-Aliasing -Extended Version.

Abstract

We present Aggregate G-Buffer Anti-Aliasing (AGAA), a new technique for efficient anti-aliased deferred rendering of complex geometry using modern graphics hardware. In geometrically complex situations where many surfaces intersect a pixel, current rendering systems shade each contributing surface at least once per pixel. As the sample density and geometric complexity increase, the shading cost becomes prohibitive for real-time rendering. Under deferred shading, so does the required framebuffer memory. Our goal is to make high per-pixel sampling rates practical for real-time applications by substantially reducing shading costs and per-pixel storage compared to traditional deferred shading. AGAA uses the rasterization pipeline to generate a compact, pre-filtered geometric representation inside each pixel. We shade this representation at a fixed rate, independent of geometric complexity. By decoupling shading rate from geometric sampling rate, the algorithm reduces the storage and bandwidth costs of a geometry buffer, and allows scaling to high visibility sampling rates for anti-aliasing. AGAA with two aggregates per-pixel generates results comparable to 32 × MSAA, but requires 54 percent less memory and is up to 2.6 × faster ( -30 percent memory and 1.7 × faster for 8 × MSAA).