Tech Report CS-93-56

Incorporating Update Rates into Today's Graphics Systems

Matthias M. Wloka

December 1993

Abstract:

Interactive animation systems and virtual environments incorporate dynamic objects. To display dynamic behavior in a sequence of discrete frames, graphics systems reinquire these dynamic objects every time before a new frame is rendered, thus implicitly implementing update rates. We propose explicitly to associate update rates with every dynamic primitive in a graphics system and let the user control each update rate individually. This approach has many benefits; for example, it yields more efficient systems, allows tradeoffs between computation quality versus computation speed, and eases multimedia integration. However, it also poses new problems to the graphics system designer, e.g., how to specify and incorporate update rates, how to compute update rate defaults, how to determine good update rate operators, and how to degrade update rates. We address these problems in this paper.

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