Hardware Design for 3D Graphics

Three-dimensional graphics has played an important role in multimedia systems and virtual reality systems. Since its applications emerge rapidly from technical areas to nontechnical areas, state-of-the-art 3-D graphics hardware design focuses not only on high performance and quality, but also on low cost and system integration. In this chapter, we discuss the methodology and bottlenecks in hardware design. The techniques for high- performance 3-D graphics synthesis and various considerations are discussed, especially parallelism and advanced memory I/O architecture. Then, some existing architectures for various design considerations are illustrated. Because most programmers rely on application program interfaces (APIs) to develop applications on hardware, the API becomes important and affects the 3-D hardware design in integrated system.