Appears in the Proceedings of the 2002 Eurographics/SIGGRAPH Workshop on Graphics Hardware, Saarbrücken, Germany, September 1-2, 2002, pp. 47-56.
The OpenGL and Reyes rendering pipelines each render complex scenes from similar scene descriptions but differ in their internal pipeline organizations. While the OpenGL organization has dominated hardware architectures over the past twenty years, a Reyes organization differs in several important ways from OpenGL, including a shader coordinate system that supports coherent texture accesses, a single shader in the vertex stage, and tessellation and sampling instead of triangle rasterization.
Hardware for the OpenGL pipeline has been well-studied, but the lack of a hardware Reyes implementation has prevented a comparison between the two pipelines. We analyze and compare implementations of an OpenGL and a Reyes pipeline on the Imagine stream processor, a high performance programmable processor for media applications. This comparison both demonstrates the applicability of Reyes for hardware implementation and exposes many issues that architects will face in implementing Reyes in hardware, in particular the need for efficient subdivision algorithms and implementations.
John D. Owens, Brucek Khailany, Brian Towles, and William J. Dally. Comparing Reyes and OpenGL on a Stream Architecture. In 2002 SIGGRAPH / Eurographics Workshop on Graphics Hardware, pages 47-56, September 2002.
@InProceedings{Owens:2002:CRA,
author = {John D. Owens and Brucek Khailany and Brian Towles and
William J. Dally},
title = {Comparing {R}eyes and {OpenGL} on a Stream Architecture},
booktitle = {2002 SIGGRAPH / Eurographics Workshop on Graphics Hardware},
year = 2002,
month = sep,
pages = {47--56},
OPTpublisher = {ACM SIGGRAPH / Eurographics / ACM Press},
annote = {The OpenGL and Reyes rendering pipelines each render
complex scenes from similar scene descriptions but differ
in their internal pipeline organizations. While the
OpenGL organization has dominated hardware architectures
over the past twenty years, a Reyes organization differs
in several important ways from OpenGL, including a shader
coordinate system that supports coherent texture
accesses, a single shader in the vertex stage, and
tessellation and sampling instead of triangle
rasterization.
Hardware for the OpenGL pipeline has been well-studied,
but the lack of a hardware Reyes implementation has
prevented a comparison between the two pipelines. We
analyze and compare implementations of an OpenGL and a
Reyes pipeline on the Imagine stream processor, a high
performance programmable processor for media
applications. This comparison both demonstrates the
applicability of Reyes for hardware implementation and
exposes many issues that architects will face in
implementing Reyes in hardware, in particular the need
for efficient subdivision algorithms and implementations.
},
}