Hardware Accelerated Shaders Using FPGAs

Goddard, Luke; Stephenson, Ian

Hardware Accelerated Shaders Using FPGAs

Files

109-116.pdf (997.63 KB)

Date

2009

Authors

Goddard, Luke
Stephenson, Ian

Publisher

The Eurographics Association

Abstract

We demonstrate that Field Programable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) can be used to accelerate shading of surfaces for production quality rendering (a task standard interactive graphics hardware is generally ill-suited to) by allowing circuits to be dynamically created at run-time on standard commercial logic boards. By compiling shaders to hardware descriptions, they can be executed on FPGA with the performance of hardware without sacrificing the flexibility of software implementations. The resulting circuits are fully pipelined, and for circuits within the capacity of the FPGA can shade MicroPolygons at a fixed rate independent of shader complexity.

        @inproceedings{10.2312:LocalChapterEvents/TPCG/TPCG09/109-116
,
booktitle = {Theory and Practice of Computer Graphics
},
editor = {Wen Tang and John Collomosse
},
title = {{Hardware Accelerated Shaders Using FPGAs
}},
author = {Goddard, Luke and 
Stephenson, Ian
},
year = {2009
},
publisher = {The Eurographics Association
},
ISBN = {978-3-905673-71-5
},
DOI = {10.2312/LocalChapterEvents/TPCG/TPCG09/109-116
}
}