August 2007
Intermediate to advanced
1008 pages
21h 13m
English
Charles Loop Microsoft Research
Jim Blinn Microsoft Research
Vector representations are a resolution-independent means of specifying shape. They have the advantage that at any scale, content can be displayed without tessellation or sampling artifacts. This is in stark contrast to a raster representation consisting of an array of color values. Raster images quickly show artifacts under scale or perspective mappings. Our goal in this chapter is to present a method for accelerating the rendering of vector representations on the GPU.
Modern graphics processing units excel at rendering triangles and triangular approximations to smooth objects. It is somewhat surprising to realize that the same architecture ...