Hexagonal Storage Scheme for Interleaved Frame Buffers and Textures

Abstract

This paper presents a storage scheme which statically assigns pixel/texel coordinates to multiple memory banks in order to minimize frame buffer and texture memory access load imbalance. In this scheme, the pixels stored in a particular memory bank are placed at the center and the vertices of hexagons packed in the frame buffer. By making these hexagons close to regular so that the pixel placement is uniform and isotropic, frame buffer and texture memory accesses are evenly distributed over the memory banks. The analysis of memory access patterns in rendering typical 3D graphics scenes shows that the hexagonal storage scheme can reduce rendering performance degradation due to bank conflicts by an average of 10% compared to the traditional rectangular storage scheme.