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

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Date
1998
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
The Eurographics Association
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.
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@inproceedings{
:10.2312/EGGH/EGGH98/113-122
, booktitle = {
SIGGRAPH/Eurographics Workshop on Graphics Hardware
}, editor = {
S. N. Spencer
}, title = {{
IMEM: An Intelligent Memory for Bump- and Reflection-Mapping
}}, author = {
Kugler, Anders
}, year = {
1998
}, publisher = {
The Eurographics Association
}, ISSN = {
1727-3471
}, ISBN = {
0-89791-097-X
}, DOI = {
/10.2312/EGGH/EGGH98/113-122
} }
Citation