ABSTRACT

In many cases, discussions of modern real-time rendering techniques tend to revolve around the programmable pipeline and what can be done with it. The pipeline is indeed a critically important piece in the real-time rendering puzzle, especially since one of the primary tasks of the graphics developer is writing shader programs for use in the pipeline. However, the importance of the memory resources connected to the pipeline is often overlooked in these discussions. It is just as important to understand what resources are required for a particular algorithm, where they will be used, and how they will be used.