EGGH04: SIGGRAPH/Eurographics Workshop on Graphics Hardware 2004

Permanent URI for this collection

https://diglib.eg.org/handle/10.2312/331

Browse

Browsing EGGH04: SIGGRAPH/Eurographics Workshop on Graphics Hardware 2004 by Subject "Hardware Architecture"

Now showing 1 - 4 of 4
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    A Flexible Simulation Framework for Graphics Architectures
    (The Eurographics Association, 2004) Sheaffer, J. W.; Luebke, D.; Skadron, K.; Tomas Akenine-Moeller and Michael McCool
    In this paper we describe a multipurpose tool for analysis of the performance characteristics of computer graphics hardware and software. We are developing Qsilver, a highly configurable micro-architectural simulator of the GPU that uses the Chromium system's ability to intercept and redirect an OpenGL stream. The simulator produces an annotated trace of graphics commands using Chromium, then runs the trace through a cycle-timer model to evaluate time-dependent behaviors of the various functional units. We demonstrate the use of Qsilver on a simple hypothetical architecture to analyze performance bottlenecks, to explore new GPU microarchitectures, and to model power and leakage properties. One innovation we explore is the use of dynamic voltage scaling across multiple clock domains to achieve significant energy savings at almost negligible performance cost. Finally, we discuss how other architectural features and experiments might be incorporated into the Qsilver framework.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    A Quadrilateral Rendering Primitive
    (The Eurographics Association, 2004) Hormann, Kai; Tarini, Marco; Tomas Akenine-Moeller and Michael McCool
    The only surface primitives that are supported by common graphics hardware are triangles and more complex shapes have to be triangulated before being sent to the rasterizer. Even quadrilaterals, which are frequently used in many applications, are rendered as a pair of triangles after splitting them along either diagonal. This creates an undesirable C1-discontinuity that is visible in the shading or texture signal. We propose a new method that overcomes this drawback and is designed to be implemented in hardware as a new rasterizer. It processes a potentially non-planar quadrilateral directly without any splitting and interpolates attributes smoothly inside the quadrilateral. This interpolation is based on a recent generalization of barycentric coordinates that we adapted to handle perspective correction and situations in which a quadrilateral is partially behind the point of view.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Silhouette Maps for Improved Texture Magnification
    (The Eurographics Association, 2004) Sen, Pradeep; Tomas Akenine-Moeller and Michael McCool
    Texture mapping is a simple way of increasing visual realism without adding geometrical complexity. Because it is a discrete process, it is important to properly filter samples when the sampling rate of the texture differs from that of the final image. This is particularly problematic when the texture is magnified or minified. While reasonable approaches exist to tackle the minified case, few options exist for improving the quality of magnified textures in real-time applications. Most simply bilinearly interpolate between samples, yielding exceedingly blurry textures. In this paper, we address the real-time magnification problem by extending the silhouette map algorithm to general texturing. In particular, we discuss the creation of these silmap textures as well as a simple filtering scheme that allows for viewing at all levels of magnification. The technique was implemented on current graphics hardware and our results show that we can achieve a level of visual quality comparable to that of a much larger texture.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Tile-Based Texture Mapping on Graphics Hardware
    (The Eurographics Association, 2004) Wei, Li-Yi; Tomas Akenine-Moeller and Michael McCool
    Texture mapping has been a fundamental feature for commodity graphics hardware. However, a key challenge for texture mapping is how to store and manage large textures on graphics processors. In this paper, we present a tilebased texture mapping algorithm by which we only have to physically store a small set of texture tiles instead of a large texture. Our algorithm generates an arbitrarily large and non-periodic virtual texture map from the small set of stored texture tiles. Because we only have to store a small set of tiles, it minimizes the storage requirement to a small constant, regardless of the size of the virtual texture. In addition, the tiles are generated and packed into a single texture map, so that the hardware filtering of this packed texture map corresponds directly to the filtering of the virtual texture. We implement our algorithm as a fragment program, and demonstrate performance on latest graphics processors.