Parallel rendering

I've spent the last week designing and implementing the low-level parts of the renderer used in our new engine. One of the key design principles of the engine is to go as wide / parallel as possible whenever possible. To be able to do that in a clean and efficient way a good data streaming model with minimal pointer chasing is key.

With the rendering I've tackled that by splitting the batch processing in three passes: batch gathering, merge-n-sort and display list building.

In the batch gathering pass we walk over the visible objects (objects that have survived visibility culling) and let them queue their draw calls to a RenderContext. A RenderContext is a platform independent package stream that holds all data needed for draw calls (and other render jobs/events/state changes etc). This step is easily divided into any number of jobs, by letting each job have its own RenderContext.

After the batch gathering is done we have all data needed to draw the scene in n number of RenderContexts. The purpose of the merge-n-sort step is to take those RenderContexts, merge them to one while at the same time sorting all batches into the desired order (with respect to "layers", minimizing state changes, depth sorting etc).

We now have one sorted package stream containing all the draw calls that we can send off to the rendering back-end. At this point we can again go wide and build the display list in parallel. Here's a small sketch illustrating the data flow:

Red sections belongs to the platform independent renderer. Blue sections belongs to the rendering back-end (in this illustration D3D11).