Adaptive Shading using Hardware Tessellation

Bachelor-Thesis

According to the graphics pipeline shading is considered to be done in the pixel shader. Thus, the shading frequency is always bound to the number of pixel shader evaluations. On current GPUs this means that shading is performed either once per pixel or according the respective multi-sampling pattern which is used for anti-aliasing: Under- and oversampling are often the result. Instead it is desired to use an adaptive shading frequency which matches local features such as specular highlights. Hardware tessellation now allows to adaptively subdivide geometry by introducing two new stages to the graphics pipeline, namely hull and domain shader. The goal of this thesis is to obtain a tessellation density that corresponds to desired shading frequency. Shading computations can then be done on a per vertex level in the domain shader.

Advisor(s)