METHOD AND APPARATUS FOR RENDERING OF FRACTIONAL PIXEL LISTS FOR ANTI- ALIASING AND TRANSPARENCY

A system for rendering visual images that combines sophisticated anti-aliasing and pixel blending techniques with control pipelining in hardware embodiment. A highly-parallel rendering pipeline performs sophisticated polygon edge interpolation, pixel blending and anti-aliasing rendering operations in hardware. Primitive polygons are transformed to subpixel coordinates and then sliced and diced to create "pixlink" elements mapped to each pixel. An oversized frame buffer memory allows the storage of many pixlinks for each pixel. Z-sorting is avoided through the use of a linked-list data object for each pixlink vector in a pixel stack. Because all image data values for X, Y, Z, R, G, B and pixel coverage A are maintained in the pixlink data object, sophisticated blending operations are possible for anti-aliasing and transparency. Data parallelism in the rendering pipeline overcomes the processor efficiency problem arising from the computation-intensive rendering algorithms used in the system of this invention. Single state machine control is made possible through linked data/control pipelining.