Poulton The object of this project is to build and experiment with a new graphics engine that will eliminate the current limits to scalability in commercial graphics systems. The work centers on a new graphics engine architecture called image composition, which is radically different from the organization of today's commercial systems. In image composition, rendering is distributed over a number of identical processors. Each renderer generates a full-screen image, but for only a fraction of the primitives in the scene. The system then merges these images over a high-speed network to form a single image of all primitives. Since each subimage is independent, and since the images can be merged on a distributed network whose throughput scales linearly with the number of subimages, performance of the entire system can be scaled up arbitrarily by adding more processors.
