Ronald J Swallow

US Patent:

20050179696, Aug 18, 2005

Filed:

Jan 10, 2005

Appl. No.:

11/032065

Inventors:

Ronald Swallow - Emmaus PA, US

International Classification:

G06T015/30
G06T015/40
G06T017/00
G06T011/00
G06T011/40
G06T011/20
G06T015/10
G06T015/00
G09G005/00

US Classification:

345582000, 345423000, 345421000, 345419000, 345427000, 345420000, 345441000, 345552000, 345469000, 345428000, 345586000, 345643000

Abstract:

The image generator described by this patent is designed to generate in real-time the perspective view in a 3D world consisting of hundreds of millions of polygons, of which 9 million are in the field of view. The hardware achieves this performance by requiring all calculations for a quad polygon to be performed in one clock cycle, down a very deep hardware pipe. This is achieved by organizing the work within 320 small regions of the perspective screen where the required Z-buffer for each region can be implemented by internal cache in the FPGA, and where objects are first sorted into these regions and then their polygons processed, one at a time. Any polygons larger than 3 pixels in perspective size are initially chopped by a power of 2 until less than that size, permitting the hardware pipe to perform all calculations on the polygon components (polygon-lets) in one clock cycle including the 144 calculations of all the Z-buffer values for the sub-pixels under the polygon-lets.