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Now showing 1 - 4 of 4
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    Testing Geometric Primitive Shaders
    (The Eurographics Association, 1991) Dunnett, G. J.; White, M.; Lister, P. F.; Grimsdale, R. L.; A. Kaufman
    We present a design and test strategy for Geometric Primitive Shadersintegratedcircuits which perform rasterisation of primitives such as vectors and triangles.The design strategy proceeds through various levels of detail, and we describethe need for testing as the design advances. A suitable set of test are given for a typicalshader. Our experiences in applying the strategy to a real device are discussed,together with the tests which we devised, and practical compromises which we had to make."
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    Performance of Space Subdivision Techniques in Ray Tracing
    (Blackwell Science Ltd and the Eurographics Association, 1992) McNeill, M. D. J.; Shah, B. C.; Hebert, M.-P.; Lister, P. F.; Grimsdale, R. L.
    Whilst providing images of excellent quality, ray tracing is a computationally intensive task. The first part of this paper compares the speed-up achieved in ray tracing using various space subdivision algorithms and discusses the implications of implementing the algorithms on parallel processing systems. The second part addresses the problem of building the data structure within the rendering process, a situation which occurs when the rendering process is parallelised and dynamic scenes are rendered. Greater performance can be achieved with dynamic structure building compared to creation of the structure prior to rendering. The dynamic building algorithm proposed reduces the building time and storage cost of space subdivision structures, and decreases the data structure creation-render cycle time, thus enhancing image parallelism performance.
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    The AIDA Display Processor System Architecture
    (The Eurographics Association, 1990) Evans, S. R.; Grimsdale, R. 1.; Lister, P. F.; Nimmo, A. D.; Richard Grimsdale and Arie Kaufman
    This paper describes the Advanced Image Display Architecture, AIDA. The primary aims were to design a graphics display subsystem capable of satisfying the needs of both high performance workstations and vehicle simulator visual systems. AIDA can accept planar triangle primitives which have been transformed, clipped and projected by preceding stages. The system implements many desirable features including modularity, anti-aliasing, translucency, pixel-rate hidden surface removal and Gouraud shading. AIDA has been designed to take advantage of ASIC technology in the implementation of its processing units.
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    MARTI-A Multiprocessor Architecture for Ray Tracing Images
    (The Eurographics Association, 1990) Hebert, M-P.; McNeill, M. D. J.; Shah, B.; Grimsdale, R. 1.; Lister, P. F.; Richard Grimsdale and Arie Kaufman
    Multiprocessor systems are well suited to ray tracing, since each ray can be traced independently. However, the large databases required to model complex scenes create problems of data access. In this paper we propose a multiprocessor architecture for ray tracing which removes the need for duplication of the database at processor level. The database is held on a group processor basis, and resides in shared memory. Many of these groups, or clusters, can be replicated to form a highly parallel multiprocessing system. Results of a software simulation of the architecture are promising, indicating that a large number of processors per cluster is possible.