3D graphics system with VLIW processor for geometry acceleration

Abstract

To process enormous 3D data, we have designed a VLIW (Very Long Instruction Word) processor called FLOVA (Floating-Point VLIW Architecture) exploiting the ILP (Instruction-Level Parallelism) in 3D programs. This paper presents FGA (FLOVA Geometry Accelerator) that is the 3D graphics system and it almost removes the time required to process in the geometry stage. We have developed the 3D graphics library, FGA-GL, to supports the FGA system. The deferred primitive rendering algorithm of FGA-GL enables the geometry processing of the primitive data to be done concurrently with the host job such as primitive data management or game play. FGA improves the average performance of 3D graphics system by 2.5-3.0.