Design Principles of Hardware-based Phong Shading and Bump Mapping

Abstract

The VISA+ hardware architecture is the first of a new generation of graphics accelerators designed primarily to render bump-, texture-, environment- and environment-bump-mapped polygons. This paper presents examples of the main graphical capabilities and discusses methods and simplifications used to create high quality images. One of the key concepts in the VISA+ design, the use of reflectance cubes, is predestined for environment mapping. In combination with bump- and texture­ mapping it shows the strength of our new architecture. Furthermore it justifies some of the decision's made duringsimulation and development of the complex VISA+ architecture.