Reconfigurable Depth Buffer Compression Design for 3D Graphics System

Depth buffer bandwidth reduction is one of the most important issues in bandwidth-limited 3D computer graphics system. In this paper, we propose a reconfigurable algorithm for depth buffer compression. For 8x8 tile size and 16-bit depth values, the proposed algorithm can achieve 1.91:1 compression ratio on average and improve 76.9% and 39.4% compared with HA [12] and DDPCM [7], respectively. Furthermore, the devised algorithm supports one-plane and two-plane compression modes and manipulates break points more efficiently.