HyperZ

HyperZ is the name of a collection of different techniques for efficiency improvement of graphics chips, ATI Technologies has developed and is used in the Radeon graphics chips for use.

HyperZ was introduced with the first Radeon and ATI Technologies claimed that HyperZ allows a 20 % increase in rendering efficiency. How can the Radeon provide 1.5 Gigatexel / s fill rate, although the could theoretically reach only 1.2 Gigatexel / s. Practical tests actually showed an increase in speed, so that the weaker Radeon actually had caught up with the GeForce 2 GTS.

With each new graphics core ATI revised and improved these techniques. Thus, with the Radeon 8500 HyperZ II introduced from the Radeon 9700 came HyperZ III to use and so far last development stage HyperZ HD, came with the Radeon X800 on the market.

NVIDIA has introduced the GeForce 3 is a similar technology called Lightspeed Memory Architecture (LMA ).

Operation

HyperZ consists of three mechanisms:

Z Compression: The Z- buffer is a lossless compression method is stored at the required data rate for reading or writing of the Z- buffer to be minimized.

Fast Z Clear: Instead of deleting the Z-buffer to fill it completely with zeros and thus to consume data rate for writing, just a whole block of the Z- buffer is marked for deletion.

Hierarchical Z- Buffer: This technique allows the checking of pixels to be rendered, whether they are visible at all in the final scene. These unnecessary pixels are then discarded before they pollute the render pipeline.