title: A memory-efficient unified early z-test.
abstract: The Unified Early Z-Test (U-EZT) is proposed to examine the visibility of pixels during tile-based rasterization in a mobile 3D graphics processor. U-EZT combines the advantages of the Z-max and Z-min EZT algorithms: the Z-max algorithm is improved by the independently updatable z-max tiles and the use of mask bits; and the Z-min algorithm is improved by reusing the mask bits from the z-max test to update the z-min tiles after tile rasterizing. As a result, storage requirements are reduced to 3 bits per pixel, and simulations suggest that U-EZT requires 20 percent to 57 percent less memory bandwidth than previous EZT algorithms.
authors: Department of Electrical and Computer Science Engineering, Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, Daejeon, Republic of Korea. hykim@mvlsi.kaist.ac.kr
authors: Hong-Yun
authors: HY
authors: Kim
authors: Chang-Hyo
authors: CH
authors: Yu
authors: Lee-Sup
authors: LS
authors: Kim