Design and Implementation of a Multi-precision Texture Unit

• Main Authors: Yin-Chen Chang, 張尹貞
• Other Authors: Shiann-Rong Kuang
• Format: Others
• Language: zh-TW
• Published: 2015
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/6n4eze

碩士 === 國立中山大學 === 資訊工程學系研究所 === 103 === With the rapid development of 3-D graphics processing units (3-D GPUs), users ask more high quality, more high performance, and more low power consumption for 3-D graphics applications. As a result, texture unit is becoming more important in 3-D GPUs. Texture unit is able to rotate and resize a bitmap to be placed onto an arbitrary plane of a given 3D object as a texture, leading to more details and high quality for the images. In this thesis, texture unit is implemented as a separate processor to deal with the texture operations and enhance the performance of 3-D GPUs. Besides, human eyes can’t recognize a slight distortion of 3-D images. Therefore, minimizing the precision of texture operations under the acceptable accuracy loss can reduce the power consumption of texture unit. Accordingly, we propose the hardware architecture of a multi-precision texture unit, which can change the computation precisions for trading the power efficiency with the quality of the rendered image. Lower precision can be selected to significantly reduce the power consumption of texture unit when the accuracy loss is allowable.