IMEM: An Intelligent Memory for Bump- and Reflection-Mapping

Kugler, Anders

IMEM: An Intelligent Memory for Bump- and Reflection-Mapping

Files

113-122.pdf (1.3 MB)

Date

1998

Authors

Kugler, Anders

Publisher

The Eurographics Association

Abstract

Data path simplification in the context of reflection- and bumpmapping hardware opens new solutions in the design of rendering and shading circuits. We are proposing a novel approach to rendering bump- and reflection-mapped surfaces, where the local geometry defining bump-maps is transformed on-the-fly prior to surface shading. Applying angular encoding to normal vectors results in narrower data paths and permits hardware integration of look-up tables of acceptable size. A special-purpose logic-embedded memory architecture is presented, where bump- and reflection-mapping of textured surfaces are executed by an intelligent memory device. High-performance surface shading is achieved by making use of precomputed shading- and reflection-map coordinate generation tables, and considering cache coherence of pixel-to-pixel normal vectors. Such a dedicated memory chip can easily be interfaced to a standard rasterizer, in place of texture memory to offer bump-, texture- and reflection-mapping hardware support.

        @inproceedings{:10.2312/EGGH/EGGH98/113-122
,
booktitle = {SIGGRAPH/Eurographics Workshop on Graphics Hardware
},
editor = {S. N. Spencer
},
title = {{IMEM: An Intelligent Memory for Bump- and Reflection-Mapping
}},
author = {Kugler, Anders
},
year = {1998
},
publisher = {The Eurographics Association
},
ISSN = {1727-3471
},
ISBN = {0-89791-097-X
},
DOI = {/10.2312/EGGH/EGGH98/113-122
}
}