DECOMPOSING CUBIC BEZIER SEGMENTS FOR TESSELLATION-FREE STENCIL FILLING

One embodiment of the present invention sets forth a technique for decomposing and filling cubic Bèzier segments of paths without tessellating the paths. Path rendering may be accelerated when a GPU or other processor is configured to perform the decomposition operations. Cubic Bèzier paths are classified and decomposed into simple cubic Bèzier path segments based on the classification. A stencil buffer is then generated that indicates pixels that are inside of the decomposed cubic Bèzier segments. The paths are then filled according to the stencil buffer to produce a filled path.