GPU Pro 4

4

III

Practical Framebuffer Compression

Pavlos Mavridis and Georgios Papaioannou

4.1 Introduction

In computer graphics, the creation of realistic images requires multiple samples

per pixel, to avoid aliasing artifacts, and floating-point precision, in order to prop-

erly represent the high dynamic range (HDR) of the environmental lighting. Both

of these requirements vastly increase the storage and bandwidth consumption of

the framebuffer. In particular, using a multisample framebuffer with N samples

per pixel requires N times more memory. On top of that, the usage of a 16-bit

half-float storage format doubles the memory and bandwidth requirements when

compared ...