Single chip hardware support for rasterization and texture mapping

Today's interactive 3D-applications on PCs demand efficient hardware support for functionality, e.g. shading and texture mapping. In this paper, I present an ASIC that integrates most of the 3D-related funcionality defined in Intel's de-facto standard 3DR. As the chip was designed for real time environmental simulation systems, the main focus has been on texture mapping, which provides the most natural appearance at a moderate effort level. To avoid artifacts during texture mapping, the chip performs bi- or tri-linear blending on a MIPmap structure. Texture addresses are calculated perspective correct. A crucial problem concerning the tri-linear blending is the necessary data bandwidth between ASIC and the texture buffer. Therefore, I discuss several memory types and architctures for the texture buffer depending on performance, price and board space requirements. A short overview of different system architectures using the ASIC concludes the paper.