The Setup for Triangle Rasterization

Abstract

Integrating the slope and setup calculationsfor triangles to the rasterizer offloads the host processor from intensive calculations and can significantly increase 3D system performance. The processing on the host is greatly reduced and much less data is passed from the host to the graphics subsystem. A setup architecture handling generalized triangle meshes and computing all necessary parameters for a high-end raster pipe­line to generate Gouraud shaded, texture- and bump­mapped triangles is described and its benefits on the final bandwidth are shown. To efficiently compute the slopes and color gradients for each triangle, some implementation aspects on division and multiplicationpipelines are discussed.