John Brunhaver, Kayvon Fatahalian, and Pat Hanrahan
High Performance Graphics 2010
Current GPUs rasterize micropolygons (polygons approximately one pixel in size) inefficiently. Additionally, they do not natively support triangle rasterization with jittered sampling, defocus, or motion blur. We perform a microarchitectural study of fixed-function micropolygon rasterization using custom circuits. We present three rasterization designs: the first optimized for triangle micropolygons that are not blurred, a second for stochastic rasterization of micropolygons with motion and defocus blur, and third that is a hybrid combination of the two. Our designs achieve high area and power efficiency by using low-precision operations and rasterizing pairs of adjacent triangles in parallel. We demonstrate optimized designs synthesized in a 45 nm process showing that a micropolygon rasterization unit with a throughput of 3 billion micropolygons per second would consume 2.9 W and occupy 4.1 mm^2 which is 0.77% of the die area of a GeForce GTX 480 GPU.