Omega-Test: A Predictive Early-Z Culling to Improve the Graphics Pipeline Energy-Efficiency

The most common task of GPUs is to render images in real time. When rendering a 3D scene, a key step is to determine which parts of every object are visible in the final image. There are different approaches to solve the visibility problem, the Z-Test being the most common. A main factor that significantly penalizes the energy efficiency of a GPU, especially in the mobile arena, is the so-called overdraw, which happens when a portion of an object is shaded and rendered but finally occluded by another object. This useless work results in a waste of energy; however, a conventional Z-Test only avoids a fraction of it. In this article we present a novel microarchitectural technique, the Omega-Test, to drastically reduce the overdraw on a Tile-Based Rendering (TBR) architecture. Graphics applications have a great degree of inter-frame coherence, which makes the output of a frame very similar to the previous one. The proposed approach leverages the frame-to-frame coherence by using the resulting information of the Z-Test for a tile (a buffer containing all the calculated pixel depths for a tile), which is discarded by nowadays GPUs, to predict the visibility of the same tile in the next frame. As a result, the Omega-Test early identifies occluded parts of the scene and avoids the rendering of non-visible surfaces eliminating costly computations and off-chip memory accesses. Our experimental evaluation shows average EDP savings in the overall GPU/Memory system of 26.4 percent and an average speedup of 16.3 percent for the evaluated benchmarks.