Rasterization in a sentence

Further refinements While the basic rasterization process has been known for decades, modern applications continue to make optimizations and additions to increase the range of possibilities for the rasterization rendering engine.

It’s likely that until graphics cards become powerful enough where ray tracing or path tracing are as easily rendered as rasterization, that we’ll see a combination of lighting effects in future games, since each technique has its place.

They also offer, more often than not, better rasterization performance out of the box.

Alternatively, rasterization can be done in a more complicated manner by first rendering the vertices of a face and then rendering the pixels of that face as a blending of the vertex colors.

First, large areas of the image may be empty of primitives; rasterization will ignore these areas, but pixel-by-pixel rendering must pass through them.

For performance, rays can be clustered according to their direction, with rasterization hardware and depth peeling used to efficiently sum the rays.

However, rasterization is simply the process of computing the mapping from scene geometry to pixels and does not prescribe a particular way to compute the color of those pixels.

Rasterization is frequently faster than pixel-by-pixel rendering.

Second, rasterization can improve cache coherency and reduce redundant work by taking advantage of the fact that the pixels occupied by a single primitive tend to be contiguous in the image.

Since it is difficult to know that the rasterization engine will draw all pixels from front to back, there must be some way of ensuring that pixels close to the viewer are not overwritten by pixels far away.

Sometimes designers will use one rasterization method on some faces and the other method on others based on the angle at which that face meets other joined faces, thus increasing speed and not hurting the overall effect.

The older form of rasterization is characterized by rendering an entire face (primitive) as a single color.

There is also often an ambient light value that is added to all final lighting calculations to arbitrarily compensate for global illumination effects which rasterization can not calculate correctly.

This newer method of rasterization utilizes the graphics card's more taxing shading functions and still achieves better performance because the simpler textures stored in memory use less space.