Hardware for Superior Texture Performance

Abstract

Mapping textures onto suIfaces of computer-gener­ ated objects is a technique which greatly improves the realism of their appearance. Unfortunately, this imposes high computational demands and, even worse, tremendous memory bandwidth require­ ments on the graphics system. Tight cost frames in the industry in conjunction with ever increasing user expectations make the design of a powerful texture mapping unit a difficult task.To meet these requirements we follow two different approaches. On the technology side, we observe a rapidly emerging technology which offers the com­ bination of enormous transfer rates and computing power: logic-embedded memories.On the algorithmic side, a common way to reduce data traffic is image compression. Its application to texture mapping, however, is difficult since the decompression must be done at pixel frequency.In this work we will focus on the latter approach, describing the use of a specific compression scheme for texture mapping. It allows the use of a very sim­ ple and fast decompression hardware, bringing high performance texture mapping to low-cost systems.