The rendering pipeline is graphics view of parallelism. Pipelining is the division of a process into functional units that can be done serially, so when one object gets through a functional unit another can start without waiting for the first object to complete its processing. Shading and visible surface determination methods will dictate how much parallelism/pipelining can be applied to the rendering process. Rasterization is a pure parallel process, but we may need to go through a piped process before we get there.

The combinations that are examined in detail are:

• Z-buffer with Gouraud shading
• Z-buffer with Phong shading
• List priority with Phong shading
• Ray tracing

A key point is that Gouraud shading can be done early in the rendering process whereas Phong shading has to wait until the vertex/surface vectors are defined. Ray tracing handles practically all of the graphics tasks.

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