A realtime rough surface renderer

A real-time hardware renderer for light-reflected images with rough surface properties has been developed as one of the graphics functions embedded within a single chip. The renderer comprises Bui-Tuong Phong´s (1975) and R.L. Cook & K.E. Torrance´s (1982) models on the basis of empirical, physical or wave theory. To simplify the hardware architecture and to avoid vector normalization, every polygon interpolation, surface normal, light-source direction, view direction and bump normal are represented by an angular form. The renderer produces reflective images of rough surfaces within 0.8 ns (1.25 billion pixels). This paper describes the new hardware-based algorithms and architectures