A Real-Time Raster Scan Display for 3-D Graphics

This paper describes the architecture of a raster scan display for real-time visualisation of shaded polygons. A performance of 15-106 Phong shaded pixels per second is a primary goal of a pipelined rendering processor. The performance of the geometry processor, which is responsible for the geometrical transformations, the 3-d clipping and the perspective projection, will exceed 100,000 triangle shaped polygons. Following a survey of the entire 3-d real-time system, we will describe architectural details of the rendering processor. Finally, the main features enabled by the architecture are highlighted.