A Run-Time Reconfigurable Texture Unit

• Main Authors: Wei-Ting Wang, 汪威定
• Other Authors: Chung-Ping Chung
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2006
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/80864160712134566276

碩士 === 國立交通大學 === 資訊科學與工程研究所 === 94 === Texture filters are one of cost intensive parts in 3-D Graphics Processing Unit architecture and cost of them is increasing due to revealed floating point filtering techniques in Microsoft Shader Model 3.0 with High Dynamic Range feature and increasing number of texture filters (i.e. # of texture unit, a texture unit is composed of a texture filter and other components) required in GPU architecture. Therefore, a low-cost texture filter design in realistic and real-time rendering is required. The usage of filter types varies over run time. Furthermore, there are a large number of shared operations between each filter type. An all-purpose texture filter which can switch flexibly for all filter type can save significant area. Run-time reconfigurable computing offers an opportunity of obtaining high computing speed at lower hardware costs, compared to ASIC. Long run-length of data requiring the same filter type implies small reconfigurable overhead. In this thesis, a run-time reconfigurable texture filter design with low area-time product is proposed. First, a divide-and-conquer-like design for a low area-time product texture filter within a texture unit is proposed. We form a larger texture filter cross multiple texture units to improve its area-time product by integrating the texture filters within multiple texture units, which is the second design. A round-robin-like design to increase the utilization of a reconfigurable texture unit is proposed. The experimental result shows the texture filter cross multiple texture units design achieve 14.2% area saving with 2.5% longer execution time and 12.1% area-time product reduction compared to texture filters within multiple texture units design.