Soft breadboard for real-time 3D rendering

A key challenge to tomorrow´s real-time 3D rendering engines has been the memory bandwidth barrier, which limits how fast an image can be painted onto image memory. Another has been the floating point throughput that limits how much world coordinate data can be mapped to the screen. Other traditional challenges remain. The 3D engine must be small, modular, and affordable so it can be integrated into tomorrow´s vision systems easily. Ways to overcome these barriers are being developed by implementing novel 3D renderer prototypes on a new “software breadboard.” The breadboard, implemented in C and VHDL, permits rapid evaluation of promising concepts using off-the-shelf models and high level structures. The breadboard, being developed under the auspices of Wright Laboratory, will help determine which functions should be implemented using ASICs. Breadboard benchmarks and associated analyses show that a single card, capable of rendering useful real-time “out-the-window” scenes, is feasible today. The “software breadboard” is being used to design tomorrow´s real-time 3D renderers