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Item Heresy: A Virtual Image-Space 3D Rasterization Architecture(The Eurographics Association, 1997) Chiueh, Tzi-cker; A. Kaufmann and W. Strasser and S. Molnar and B.-O. SchneiderWith the advent of virtual reality and other visual applications that require photo and cinema realism, 3D graphics hardware has started to enter into the main stream. This paper describes the design and evaluation of a cost-effective highperformance 3D graphics system called Heresy that is based on virtual image-space architecture. Heresy features three novel architectural mechanisms. First, the lazy shading mechanism renders the shading computation effort to be proportional to the screen area but independent of the scene complexity. Second, the speculative Z-buffer hardware allows one-cycle Z-value comparison, as opposed to four cycles in conventional designs. Third, to avoid the intermediate sorting required by virtual image-space rasterization architecture, we develop an innovative display database traversal algorithm that is tailored to given user projection views. With this technique, the sorting-induced delay and extra memory requirements associated with image-order rasterization are completely eliminated. By replicating the Heresypipeline, it is estimated that the overall performance of the system can reach over 1 million Gouraud-shaded and 2D mip-mapped triangles per second at 20 frames/set with 1K x 1K resolution per frame.Item Characterization of Static 3D Graphics Workloads(The Eurographics Association, 1997) Chiueh, Tzi-cker; Lin, Wei-jen; A. Kaufmann and W. Strasser and S. Molnar and B.-O. Schneider3D graphics transform 3D models into 2D images by simulating the physics of light propagation from the lighting sources, through the objects, and eventually to the eyes. Although specialized graphics hardware engines have been proposed and implemented in the past, and a heated interest in PC-class 3D graphics cards is currently emerging, detailed descriptions and analysis of 3D graphics workloads which graphics hardware design can be based on are almost non-existent. This work takes the first step towards a comprehensive 3D graphics workload characterization by reporting the results of an empirical study using an instrumented software polygonal renderer tested on a wide variety of static 3D graphics models with sufficiently sophisticated geometric and texture properties.