A Multipurpose Hardware Shader

Abstract

For the last few years the state of the art in producing three-dimensional Gouraud shaded graphics has been the use of Gouraud shading hardware. Combined with z-buffering it enables graphic workstations to provide real time display. The disadvantages of this approach are the relatively poor quality of Gouraud shaded images and its still very high cost, which so far prohibit real-time applications running on standard PCs. This article describes a universal approach to provide a very powerful graphic unit using minimal hardware at very low cost. This graphic unit will not only support Gouraud shading, but also such methods as 2D-texturing [3], solid texturing [10], normal (bump) texturing [2], shadow mapping [15, 13] and Phong shading [11] as well as a combination of these methods (shade trees [5]).