I have a bad habit of starting projects and not finishing them, like this website. I have finally realized that I need to join the rest of the world and just set up a simple, lightweight blog I can occasionally post amusing things to. I realized this when I saw this memory access pattern today that was beautiful and thought, "this must be shared with the world. I wish my website wasn't lousy." Well, stay tuned, nonexistent readership, and maybe you'll have an RSS feed worth subscribing to.
In the meantime, look:
It's a plot of the memory accesses in the Z-buffer and framebuffer of a rendering engine as draws the Utah teapot triangle-by-triangle. Blue represents writes and green represents reads. The framebuffer is the right side, only being written. On the left, it can be seen that many pixels are covered up and discarded once their Z-buffer values are read.