NyuziRaster: Optimizing rasterizer performance and energy in the Nyuzi open source GPU

The Intel Larrabee GPU was not a traditional GPU. Designers reasoned that many functions typically implemented in dedicated hardware could instead be done efficiently in software using a wide vector ALU. Among these functions was rasterization. To compensate for the absence of a dedicated rasteriser, Intel engineers designed a recursive rasterizer algorithm that efficiently utilizes Larrabee's compute resources. However, researchers recently have shown software rasterization to have substantial overhead for some workloads.