Evaluation of high performance multicache parallel texture mapping
A. John Vartanian, Jean-Luc Béchennec, Nathalie Drach-Temam · 1998
As technology enables to integrate real-time good quality 30 rendering in a single chip, the classicalproblem of the gap between internal data bandwidth and external memories arisea.The texture mapping function requires a twmendous number of texture accesses and many past implementations have been based on costly high bandwidth external memory.OUT impact study of texture cache used with today's commercial representative 30 software shows that it is possible to render 100 million pixels per second while using an internal cache smaller than 32 KB and a PC memory bus for textures.Texture blocking and number of requests on the cache contribute mainly to those Tesults.Building a high performance parallel subsystem based on such a chip may become an interesting opportunityfor 1eadingpeTformance3D graphic manufacturers though many problems have been observed with caches in parallel machines.As far as texture accesses are concerned, we show that image parallelism generates poor performance with caches.But triangle parallelism scales with multiple rendering processors, each having its own texture cache and the speedup is nearly linear.'A texrl is a pixel in the texture map