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The sort-first architecture for real-time image generation

The field of real-time computer graphics has been pushing hardware capability to its limits. There is demand to increase not only the complexity of the models that are displayed, but also the resolution of the images. To provide the ultimate power for interactive graphics, fully-parallelized systems have been developed which work on rendering multiple polygons at all major stages of the graphics pipeline. UNC researchers have devised a taxonomy of such architectures, naming the classes “sort-first,” “sort-middle,” and “sort-last” [MOLN91, MOLN94]. While the latter two have been well explored and developed, sort-first has not, despite the fact that it offers great promise for real-time rendering. 
Sort-first offers an advantage over sort-middle in that it can take advantage of the frame-to-frame coherence that is inherent in interactive applications to reduce the communications bandwidth needed to send primitives among processors. Sort-first also offers an advantage over sort-last in that it does not require huge amounts of communication bandwidth to deal with pixel traffic. Based upon these advantages, our thesis states that sort-first is the architecture best suited for rapidly rendering very high-resolution images of complex model datasets. However, to support this thesis, we must show how sort-first can be implemented efficiently. 
The main issues standing in the way of sort-first implementation are load balancing and management of a migrating primitive database. These issues are explored thoroughly in this dissertation. We demonstrate a new adaptive load-balancing method (applicable to sort-middle as well) which allows for efficient load distribution with low overhead. We also show two solution methods for managing a hierarchical database of migrating primitives. In addition we examine the communications requirements for sort-first, first by examining a design example and later by providing a comparison against sort-middle. 
Our research shows that sort-first is a viable and very competitive architecture. Its strengths make it the ideal choice when very high-resolution rendering is needed for complex, retained-mode datasets. While this dissertation clears the way for sort-first implementation, there are still many opportunities for further exploration in this area.