Dieter Schmalstieg

Is It Time to Move Beyond the Rasterization Pipeline?

Since its inception, the classic rasterization pipeline on the GPU has seen many extension in the form of new shaders, but it remains a hybrid of programmable and fixed function stages. New shader types and capabilities are added as new requirements emerge, such as low-power mobile operation, neural inference or raytracing. However, these novelties tend to be added locally (e.g., as a new pipeline stage) rather than as a globally available feature. Alas, combining the desired features as concatenated render passes is not very efficient. Meanwhile, entire graphics pipelines, such as Unreal's Nanite, are implemented entirely in compute shaders. This talk will review important directions in alternative pipeline stages and propose a potential direction where all stages of the pipeline are programmable, potentially unlocking dramatically better throughput. This idea will be illustrated by some selected studies from recent research.

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Biography

Dieter Schmalstieg is Alexander von Humboldt Professor of Visual Computing at the University of Stuttgart, Germany. Previously, he was a professor at the Institute of Computer Graphics and Vision at Graz University of Technology, Austria. His current research interests are augmented reality, virtual reality, computer graphics, visualization and human-computer interaction. He received Dipl.-Ing. (1993), Dr. techn. (1997) and Habilitation (2001) from Vienna University of Technology. He is author and co-author of over 400 peer-reviewed scientific publications with over 20,000 citations and over twenty best paper awards and nominations. His organizational roles include associate editor in chief of IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, associate editor of Frontiers in Robotics and AI, member of the steering committee of the IEEE International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality, chair of the EUROGRAPHICS working group on Virtual Environments (1999-2010), key researcher of the K-Plus Competence Center for Virtual Reality and Visualization in Vienna and key researcher of the Know-Center in Graz. In 2002, he received the START career award presented by the Austrian Science Fund. In 2008, he founded the Christian Doppler Laboratory for Handheld Augmented Reality. In 2012, he received the IEEE Virtual Reality technical achievement award, and, in 2020, the IEEE ISMAR Career Impact Award. He was elected as Fellow of IEEE, as a member of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, the Academia Europaea, and the IEEE VGTC Virtual Reality Academy.
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