A proposal for a sort-middle cluster rendering system

Cluster rendering systems often take a sort-first, sort-last, or a hybrid of these two approaches because it is generally assumed that the hardware pipeline cannot be split between the geometric and rasterization stages. These approaches often limit the scalability of the system because they introduce either load balancing problems or high contention for the communication network. We propose a novel approach for dividing up the pipeline and distributing work in a sort-middle fashion that has the promise to aid in the scaling of a cluster rendering system. We have shown, in preliminary experiments, that it is possible to implement this approach and, based on these results, we are proposing to extend an existing cluster rendering system (Chromium) to incorporate our approach