Single chip hardware support for rasterization and texture mapping

  • Authors:
  • Hans-Josef Ackermann

  • Affiliations:
  • Fraunhofer Institute for Computer Graphics, Darmstadt, Germany

  • Venue:
  • EGGH'95 Proceedings of the Tenth Eurographics conference on Graphics Hardware
  • Year:
  • 1995

Quantified Score

Hi-index 0.00

Visualization

Abstract

Today's interactive 3D-applications on PCs demand efficient hardware support for functionality, e.g. shading and texture mapping. In this paper, I present an ASIC that integrates most of the 3D-related functionality defined in Intel's de-facto standard 3DR. As the chip was designed for real time environmental simulation systems, the main focus has been on texture mapping, which provides the most natural appearance at a moderate effort level. To avoid artifacts during texture mapping, the chip performs bi-or tri-linear blending on a MIPmap structure. Texture addresses are calculated perspective correct. A crucial problem concerning the tri-linear blending is the necessary data bandwidth between ASIC and the texture buffer. Therefore, I discuss several memory types and architectures for the texture buffer depending on performance, price and board space requirements. A short overview of different system architectures using the ASIC concludes the paper.