Parallel Texture Caching
Homan Igehy,
Matthew Eldridge, and
Pat Hanrahan,
Stanford University
Appears in the Proceedings of the 1999 Eurographics/SIGGRAPH
Workshop on Graphics Hardware
Abstract:
The creation of high-quality images requires new functionality and
higher performance in real-time graphics architectures. In terms of
functionality, texture mapping has become an integral component of
graphics systems, and in terms of performance, parallel techniques are
used at all stages of the graphics pipeline. In rasterization,
texture caching has become prevalent for reducing texture bandwidth
requirements. However, parallel rasterization architectures divide
work across multiple functional units, thus potentially decreasing the
locality of texture references. For such architectures to scale well,
it is necessary to develop efficient parallel texture caching
subsystems.
We quantify the effects of parallel rasterization on texture locality
for a number of rasterization architectures, representing both current
commercial products and proposed future architectures. A
cycle-accurate simulation of the rasterization system demonstrates the
parallel speedup obtained by these systems and quantifies
inefficiencies due to redundant work, inherent parallel load
imbalance, insufficient memory bandwidth, and resource contention. We
find that parallel texture caching works well, and is general enough
to work with a wide variety of rasterization architectures.
Talk:
Paper:
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homan@graphics.stanford.edu