THE TAYRA 3-D GRAPHICS RASTER PROCESSOR

This paper describes the architecture of a 3-D Graphics Raster Process or called TAYRA. TAYRA consists of a Graphics Raster Pipeline with fiv e major external interfaces: PCI Master/Target, Depth, Texture, Colour and Video Interfaces. The Graphics Raster Pipeline performs all the m ajor OpenGL style raster functions: scan conversion of lines, spans, t riangles and rectangles, perspective correction of texture co-ordinate s, mip-map level of detail selection, and many other texture modes, al pha blending, and other functionalities. Further, through TAYRA's fast PCI to buffer access mechanisms it can do advanced stencilling, multi -pass antialiasing, and other algorithms; all accelerated in hardware with a sustained pixel write speed of 29 Mpixels/s (peak of 33 Mpixels /s). This translates to an estimated peak performance of 890 K/triangl es/s for 25 pixel triangles. (C) 1997 Elsevier Science Ltd.