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Subject: Three × Start date: 1997 × End date: 1999 × Has files: true ×

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Now showing 1 - 4 of 4
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    PixelFlow: The Realization
    (The Eurographics Association, 1997) Eyles, John; Molnar, Steven; Poulton, John; Greer, Trey; Lastra, Anselmo; England, Nick; Westover, Lee; A. Kaufmann and W. Strasser and S. Molnar and B.-O. Schneider
    PixelFlow is an architecture for high-speed, highly realistic image generation, based on the techniques of object-parallelism and image composition. Its initial architecture was described in [MOLN92]. After development by the original team of researchers at the University of North Carolina, and codevelopment with industry partners, Division Ltd. and Hewlett- Packard, PixelFlow now is a much more capable system than initially conceived and its hardware and software systems have evolved considerably. This paper describes the final realization of PixelFlow, along with hardware and software enhancements heretofore unpublished.
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    Multiresolution Rendering With Displacement Mapping
    (The Eurographics Association, 1999) Gumhold, Stefan; Hüttner, Tobias; A. Kaufmann and W. Strasser and S. Molnar and B.- O. Schneider
    In this paper, we present for the first time an approach for hardware accelerated displacement mapping. The displaced surface is generated from a 2D displacement map by remeshing a coarse triangle mesh according to the screen projection of the surface The remeshing algorithm is implemented in hardware. Filtered access to the displacement map makes our approach competitive with available view dependent multiresolution techniques. The advantage of displacement mapping is the compact representation. A displacement mapped surface consumes together with all filter levels only a fraction of the storage space needed for a hardware compatible representation of an equivalent triangle mesh. A possible design of the displacement mapping rendering pipeline is proposed. Previously described hardware components are used as often as possible. Our approach can be smoothly integrated into all available graphics application programming interfaces. Most existing graphics applications can be extended to the new feature with marginal effort.
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    Neon: A Single-Chip 3D Workstation Graphics Accelerator
    (The Eurographics Association, 1998) McCormack, Joel; McNamara, Robert; Gianos, Christopher; Seiler, Larry; Jouppi, Norman P.; Correll, Ken; S. N. Spencer
    High-performance 3D graphics accelerators traditionally require multiple chips on multiple boards, including geometry, rasterizing, pixel processing, and texture mapping chips. These designs are often scalable: they can increase performance by using more chips. Scalability has obvious costs: a minimal configuration needs several chips, and some configurations must replicate texture maps. A less obvious cost is the almost irresistible temptation to replicate chips to increase performance, rather than to design individual chips for higher performance in the first place. In contrast, Neon is a single chip that performs like a multichip design. Neon accelerates OpenGL [19] 3D rendering, as well as X11 [20] and Windows/NT 2D rendering. Since our pin budget limited peak memory bandwidth, we designed Neon from the memory system upward in order to reduce bandwidth requirements. Neon has no special-purpose memories; its eight independent 32-bit memory controllers can access color buffers, 1. depth buffers, stencil buffers, and texture data. To fit our gate budget, we shared logic among different operations with similar implementation requirements, and left floating point calculations to Digital s Alpha CPUs. Neon s performance is between HP s Visualize fx<sup>4</sup> and fx<sup>6</sup>, and is well above SGI s MXE for most operations. Neon-based boards cost much less than these competitors, due to a small part count and use of commodity SDRAMs.
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    View-independent Environment Maps
    (The Eurographics Association, 1998) Heidrich, Wolfgang; Seidel, Hans-Peter; S. N. Spencer
    Environment maps are widely used for approximating reflections in hardware-accelerated rendering applications. Unfortunately, the parameterizations for environment maps used in today s graphics hardware severely undersample certain directions, and can thus not be used from multiple viewing directions. Other parameterizations exist, but require operations that would be too expensive for hardware implementations. In this paper we introduce an inexpensive new parameterization for environment maps that allows us to reuse the environment map for any given viewing direction. We describe how, under certain restrictions, these maps can be used today in standard OpenGL implementations. Furthermore, we explore how OpenGL could be extended to support this kind of environment map more directly.