ABSTRACT
During development it became apparent that we were going to need alpha blending, and lots of it! Unfortunately, alpha blending is one aspect of computer graphics that is difficult to get right, and trade-offs between performance and visual quality are often made; indeed, reluctance to risk performance has led to some game titles avoiding the use of alpha blending altogether. For a thorough introduction to the issues posed by alpha blended rendering, the reader is referred to the [Thibieroz 08] paper on advanced rendering techniques and the seminal work [Porter and Duff 84].
