Pomegranate is a parallel hardware architecture for polygon rendering that provides scalable input bandwidth, triangle rate, pixel rate, texture memory and display bandwidth while maintaining an immediate-mode interface. The basic unit of scalability is a single graphics pipeline, and up to 64 such units may be combined. Pomegranate's scalability is achieved with a novel “sort-everywhere” architecture that distributes work in a balanced fashion at every stage of the pipeline, keeping the amount of work performed by each pipeline uniform as the system scales. Because of the balanced distribution, a scalable network based on high-speed point-to-point links can be used for communicating between the pipelines.

Antialiasing of ray traced images is typically performed by supersampling the image plane.While this type of filtering works well for many algorithms, it is much more efficient to perform filtering locally on a surface for algorithms such as texture mapping.In order to perform this type of filtering, one must not only trace the ray passing through the pixel, but also have some approximation of the distance to neighboring rays hitting the surface (i.e., a ray's footprint).In this paper, we present a fast, simple, robust scheme for tracking such a quantity based on ray differentials, derivatives of the ray with respect to the image plane.

It has become increasingly difficult to drive a modern highperformance graphics accelerator at full speed with a serial immediate-mode graphics interface.To resolve this problem, retainedmode constructs have been integrated into graphics interfaces.While retained-mode constructs provide a good solution in many cases, at times they provide an undesirable interface model for the application programmer, and in some cases they do not solve the performance problem.In order to resolve some of these cases, we present a parallel graphics interface that may be used in conjunction with the existing API as a new paradigm for highperformance graphics applications.The parallel API extends existing ideas found in OpenGL and X11 that allow multiple graphics contexts to simultaneously draw into the same image.Through the introduction of synchronization primitives, the parallel API allows parallel traversal of an explicitly ordered scene.We give code examples which demonstrate how the API can be used to expose parallelism while retaining many of the desirable features of serial immediate-mode programming.The viability of the API is demonstrated by the performance of our implementation which achieves scalable performance on a 24 processor system.

Photographs and images often have regions which are in some sense flawed. Often, there may be a stain or an undesired feature covering a significant portion of the image, and an algorithm that can "fix" the image is desired. We propose a technique based on Heeger and Bergen's texture synthesis algorithm (1995). By integrating a composition step into the aforementioned algorithm one portion of the image can be substituted with a synthetic texture derived from another portion of the image. The goal of this synthetic texture is to create a plausible patch without visible seams or repetitive features. We compare this technique, which works on areas that are "stochastic" in nature, with other variations of image replacement which utilize a combination of image composition and texture synthesis.