Journal of KIISE:Computer Systems and Theory (한국정보과학회논문지:시스템및이론)

Korean Institute of Information Scientists and Engineers (한국정보과학회)
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The Design of VGE(Vector Geometry Engine) for 3D Graphics Geometry Processing

3차원 그래픽 지오메트리 연산을 위한 벡터 지오메트리 엔진의 설계.

  • 김원석 (대우 일렉트로닉스 리빙연구소 리빙회로팀) ;
  • 정철호 (연세대학교 컴퓨터과학) ;
  • 한탁돈 (연세대학교 컴퓨터과학과)
  • Published : 2004.02.01
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Abstract

3D Graphics accelerator is usually composed of two parts, geometry engine and rasterizer. In this paper, VGE(Vector Geometry Engine) which exploits vertex-level parallelism is proposed. In VGE, Common Floating-Point Unit by adding four-FADD, four-FMUL unit and 128-vector register accelerates geometry calculation. In comparison with SH4, Performance result show that the VGE can achieve performance gain over 4.7 times. To evaluate VGE performance, we make simulator to rebuild Simple-Scalar, general purpose processor simulator. In simulator model, we use Viewperf-benchmark.

3차원 그래픽 가속기는 지오메트리 처리(geometry processing)와 레스터라이져(rasterizer)로 구성된다. 본 논문에서는 지오메트리 처리를 고속으로 수행할 수 있는 벡터 형태의 처리 구조(VGE)를 제안하였다. 특히 기존의 부동소수점을 계산할 수 있는 구조에 4개의 FADD, FMUL, 128개의 벡터 레지스터를 추가하여 지오메트리 연산을 가속했으며 VGE와 비슷한 H/W 비용을 갖는 Hitachi의 SH4와 비교했을 때 평균 4.7배의 성능향상을 보였다. 또한 성능 평가를 위해 범용프로세서 시뮬레이터인 Simplescalar 를 수정하여 시뮬레이터를 제작했으며 Viewperf Benchmark를 입력으로 사용하였다.

Keywords

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