Multi-Frame Rate Rendering for Standalone Systems

Multi-frame rate rendering is a technique for improving interaction fidelity in complex virtual environments. The technique renders the interactive elements of a scene on a separate graphics processor and composes it with the remainder of the scene using optical superposition or digital composition. Multi-frame rate rendering is naturally implemented on a graphics cluster. With the recent availability of multiple graphics cards in standalone systems multi-frame rate rendering can also be implemented on a single PC where memory bandwidth is much higher compared to off-the-shelf networking technology. This decreases overall latency and further improves interactivity. We report on our experience of implementing multi-frame rate rendering on such a multi-graphics card system. In addition we have implemented multi-frame rate rendering on a single graphics processor by interleaving the rendering streams for the interactive elements and the rest of the scene. This approach enables the use of multi-frame rate rendering on low-end graphics systems such as laptops, mobile phones, and PDAs.