The TAYRA 3-D Graphics Raster Processor

This paper describes the architecture of a 3-D Graphics Raster Processor called TAYRA. TAYRA consists of a Graphics Raster Pipeline with five major external interfaces: PCI Master/Target, Depth, Texture, Colour and Video Interfaces. The Graphics Raster Pipeline performs all the major OpenGL style raster functions: scan conversion of lines, spans, triangles and rectangles, perspective correction of texture co-ordinates, mip-map level of detail selection, and many other texture modes, alpha blending, and other functionalities. Further, through TAYRA's fast PCI to buffer access mechanisms it can do advanced stencilling, multi-pass antialiasing, and other algorithms; all accelerated in hardware with a sustained pixel write speed of 29 Mpixels/s (peak of 33 Mpixels/s). This translates to an estimated peak performance of 890 K/triangles/s for 25 pixel triangles. (C) 1997 Elsevier Science Ltd.