EGGH98: SIGGRAPH/Eurographics Workshop on Graphics Hardware 1998

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https://diglib.eg.org/handle/10.2312/337

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Browsing EGGH98: SIGGRAPH/Eurographics Workshop on Graphics Hardware 1998 by Subject "1.3.3 [Computer Graphics]"

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    Gouraud Bump Mapping
    (The Eurographics Association, 1998) Ernst, I.; Rüsseler, H.; Schulz, H.; Wittig, 0.; S. N. Spencer
    In this paper a new low cost bump mapping hardware is prcsented. The new hardware approach does not rely on per pixel lighting, but instead uses Gouraud interpolated triangles. The bump mapping effect is applied by blending the calculated per pixel bump map color onto the fragment s color. This allows realtime animated distant light-sources to react on the specified bump map. The paper further investigates a number of different variants of recently proposed bump engines. These variants range from lowend PC solution to highest quality high-end solutions.
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    High-Quality Volume Rendering Using Texture Mapping Hardware
    (The Eurographics Association, 1998) Dachille, Frank; Kreeger, Kevin; Chen, Baoquan; Bitter, Ingmar; Kaufman, Arie; S. N. Spencer
    We present a method Jor volume rendering of regular grids which takes advantage of 3D texture mapping hardware currently, available on graphics workstations. Our method products accurate shading for arbitrary and dynamically changing directional lights, viewing parameters, and transfer functions. This is achieved by hardware interpolating the data values and gradients before software classification and shading. The method works equally well for parallel and perspective projections. We present two approaches for OUT method: one which takes advantage of software ray casting optimizations and another which takes advantage of hardware blending acceleration.
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    IMEM: An Intelligent Memory for Bump- and Reflection-Mapping
    (The Eurographics Association, 1998) Kugler, Anders; S. N. Spencer
    Data path simplification in the context of reflection- and bumpmapping hardware opens new solutions in the design of rendering and shading circuits. We are proposing a novel approach to rendering bump- and reflection-mapped surfaces, where the local geometry defining bump-maps is transformed on-the-fly prior to surface shading. Applying angular encoding to normal vectors results in narrower data paths and permits hardware integration of look-up tables of acceptable size. A special-purpose logic-embedded memory architecture is presented, where bump- and reflection-mapping of textured surfaces are executed by an intelligent memory device. High-performance surface shading is achieved by making use of precomputed shading- and reflection-map coordinate generation tables, and considering cache coherence of pixel-to-pixel normal vectors. Such a dedicated memory chip can easily be interfaced to a standard rasterizer, in place of texture memory to offer bump-, texture- and reflection-mapping hardware support.
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    Neon: A Single-Chip 3D Workstation Graphics Accelerator
    (The Eurographics Association, 1998) McCormack, Joel; McNamara, Robert; Gianos, Christopher; Seiler, Larry; Jouppi, Norman P.; Correll, Ken; S. N. Spencer
    High-performance 3D graphics accelerators traditionally require multiple chips on multiple boards, including geometry, rasterizing, pixel processing, and texture mapping chips. These designs are often scalable: they can increase performance by using more chips. Scalability has obvious costs: a minimal configuration needs several chips, and some configurations must replicate texture maps. A less obvious cost is the almost irresistible temptation to replicate chips to increase performance, rather than to design individual chips for higher performance in the first place. In contrast, Neon is a single chip that performs like a multichip design. Neon accelerates OpenGL [19] 3D rendering, as well as X11 [20] and Windows/NT 2D rendering. Since our pin budget limited peak memory bandwidth, we designed Neon from the memory system upward in order to reduce bandwidth requirements. Neon has no special-purpose memories; its eight independent 32-bit memory controllers can access color buffers, 1. depth buffers, stencil buffers, and texture data. To fit our gate budget, we shared logic among different operations with similar implementation requirements, and left floating point calculations to Digital s Alpha CPUs. Neon s performance is between HP s Visualize fx<sup>4</sup> and fx<sup>6</sup>, and is well above SGI s MXE for most operations. Neon-based boards cost much less than these competitors, due to a small part count and use of commodity SDRAMs.
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    Quadratic Bezier Triangles As Drawing Primitives
    (The Eurographics Association, 1998) Bruijns, J.; S. N. Spencer
    We propose to use quadratic Bezier triangles as additional drawing primitives: quadratic Bezier triangles require much less model data for faithful representation of curved surfaces than planar triangles. Therefore, they require less storage and/or transmission capacity. Furthermore, they allow automatic level-of-detail. Finally, they result in considerable savings in model-view transformations and lighting calculations. We present two algorithms for rendering these triangles, each of which can be easily incorporated in hardware render systems currently used for planar triangles.
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    View-independent Environment Maps
    (The Eurographics Association, 1998) Heidrich, Wolfgang; Seidel, Hans-Peter; S. N. Spencer
    Environment maps are widely used for approximating reflections in hardware-accelerated rendering applications. Unfortunately, the parameterizations for environment maps used in today s graphics hardware severely undersample certain directions, and can thus not be used from multiple viewing directions. Other parameterizations exist, but require operations that would be too expensive for hardware implementations. In this paper we introduce an inexpensive new parameterization for environment maps that allows us to reuse the environment map for any given viewing direction. We describe how, under certain restrictions, these maps can be used today in standard OpenGL implementations. Furthermore, we explore how OpenGL could be extended to support this kind of environment map more directly.