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Alice 4 FPGA Rasterizer (Open Hardware Video Card Related)
- peter_d_sherman 6y ago>"The Alice 4 rasterizer is broken into two main parts: A software library linked with the C application program. The library implements the IrisGL API. It performs transformations, lighting, clipping, and retained mode (display lists). Its output is a list of commands (clear screen, draw triangle, swap buffers, etc.) that it writes to memory outside Linux's range. An FPGA configuration that reads these commands from SDRAM and executes them. For triangles it interpolates color (RGB) and depth (Z). The FPGA also scans out the image buffer to the LCD and performs other minor tasks."
- tyingq 6y agoSounds fairly similar to what Trammel Hudson has done with the BeagleBone and video output for old Macs and LED matrix displays. The Beagle Bone cpu has a pair of PRUs that can share memory with the main ARM cpu and host Linux OS. https://trmm.net/Mac-SE_video/ https://trmm.net/Mac-SE_video/ https://trmm.net/Category%3ALEDscape/ https://trmm.net/Category%3ALEDscape/
- phkahler 6y agoThis is cute, but rasterizing 50M pixels per second is child's play on a modern processor. I'm pretty sure we can raytrace 50M Ray's per second on a modern 8 core CPU with a scene of moderate complexity.
- rowanG077 6y agoCan you still run a the logic for a video game at the same time though? Graphics is very often a side-effect of the main computation.
- tyingq 6y agoThe context was "We decided to make a portable tablet that did nothing but run mid-1980’s Silicon Graphics (SGI) demos". And they note that the graphics performance seems to be similar to early 90's SGI machines.