IMEM: An Intelligent Memory for Bump- and Reflection-Mapping

Abstract

Data path simplification in the context of reflection- and bumpmapping hardware opens new solutions in the design of rendering and shading circuits. We are proposing a novel approach to rendering bump- and reflection-mapped surfaces, where the local geometry defining bump-maps is transformed on-the-fly prior to surface shading. Applying angular encoding to normal vectors results in narrower data paths and permits hardware integration of look-up tables of acceptable size. A special-purpose logic-embedded memory architecture is presented, where bump- and reflection-mapping of textured surfaces are executed by an intelligent memory device. High-performance surface shading is achieved by making use of precomputed shading- and reflection-map coordinate generation tables, and considering cache coherence of pixel-to-pixel normal vectors. Such a dedicated memory chip can easily be interfaced to a standard rasterizer, in place of texture memory to offer bump-, texture- and reflection-mapping hardware support.