Virtual hardware for graphics applications using FPGAs

The suitability of FPGA devices for implementing graphics algorithms is analysed by a series of experiments. The performance of simple and complicated graphics algorithms on two kinds of FPGAs are compared with the performance of existing custom graphics chips and against general-purpose processors with specialised instruction sets. Various architectures for incorporating FPGA-based systems into graphics workstations are discussed. Finally, a new design method (based on virtual memory) is presented that exploits the dynamically reconfigurable nature of FPGAs.<>