HARDWARE FOR SUPERIOR TEXTURE PERFORMANCE

Mapping textures onto surfaces of computer-generated objects is a tech nique which greatly improves the realism of their appearance. Unfortun ately, this imposes high computational demands and, even worse, tremen dous memory bandwidth requirements on the graphics system. Tight cost frames in the industry in conjunction with ever increasing user expect ations make the design of a powerful texture mapping unit a difficult task. To meet these requirements we follow two different approaches. O n the technology side, we observe a rapidly emerging technology which offers the combination of enormous transfer rates and computing power: logic-embedded memories. On the algorithmic side, a common way to red uce data traffic is image compression. Its application to texture mapp ing, however, is difficult since the decompression must be done at pix el frequency. In this work we will focus on the latter approach, descr ibing the use of a specific compression scheme for texture mapping. It allows the use of a very simple and fast decompression hardware, brin ging high performance texture mapping to low-cost systems. Copyright ( C) 1996 Elsevier Science Ltd