The Hardware Design of Texture Mapping

• Main Authors: Nieh, You-Cheng, 聶幼成
• Other Authors: Jen Chein-Wei
• Format: Others
• Language: zh-TW
• Published: 1997
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/24762002438972897265

碩士 === 國立交通大學 === 電子工程學系 === 85 === Three dimensional computer graphics plays an important role in the modernmultimedia image applications. Since the texture mapping technique canincrease the photorealism of the images synthesized by computers, it iswidely used in the modern 3D computer graphics. However, texture mappingrequires complex computation and large memory bandwidth that will affectthe system performance significantly. A hardware acceleration unit isrequired to minimize the impact on the system and increase the throughputof the graphics subsystem. The thesis proposes a texture mapping hardwarein a 3D graphics processor which supports OpenGLTM 3D graphics API. Thetexture mapping unit has the following features: first, it supports all themipmap texture filtering methods and the true color texture functions definedin OpenGLTM. Second, the hardware unit uses individual 512K SRAM to store thetexture maps in order to increase the rendering performance and minimize thesystem performance degradation. Third, users can pre-load up to six texturepatterns into the texture memory to minimize the latency for texture patternloading while switching among different textures. The operating frequency ofthe texture mapping hardware is targeted at 66MHz. Under the circumstance,it delivers maximum 13.2 million true color texture mapped pixels per secondwith the single-point texture filtering method, and 3.47 million pixels truecolor texture mapped pixels per second with the most complex trilinearfiltering method.