Alternate frame rendering
Alternate Frame Rendering (AFR) is a parallel graphics rendering architecture, which combines the renderings of two or more graphics cards into a single monitor, in order to improve or accelerate the video rendering performance. This technique is useful for rendering 3D video sequences in real time, generating and/or filtering textured polygons and performing other computationally intensive rendering tasks, typically associated with computer gaming, CAD and 3D modeling.
Parallel Rendering Methods
AFR belongs to a class of parallel rendering methods, which subdivide a four dimensional image frame sequence (x,y,z and time) into smaller regions, each of which is then assigned to a different physical processor within a multi-processor array. Note that the regional boundaries may be defined in space or in time.
If a computer has two video cards that combine their outputs into a single video monitor, then one of three methods could be used to create the images.
- Alternate Frame Rendering (AFR): One Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) computes all the odd video frames, the other renders the even frames.
- Scissors: One GPU renders the top half of each video frame, the other does the bottom.
- Checker board: As the name implies, the image is split into smaller squares, which are assigned to different cards