RealityEngine graphics

  • Kurt Akeley

SIGGRAPH '93: Proceedings of the 20th annual conference on Computer graphics and interactive techniques |

Published by ACM

Publication

The RealityEngine graphics system is the first of a new generation of systems designed primarily to render texture mapped, antialiased polygons. This paper describes the architecture of the RealityEngine graphics system, then justifies some of the decisions made during its design. The implementation is near-massively parallel, employing 353 independent processors in its fullest configuration, resulting in a measured fill rate of over 240 million antialiased, texture-mapped pixels per second. Rendering performance exceeds 1 million antialiased, texture mapped triangles per second. In addition to supporting the functions required of a general purpose, high-end graphics workstation, the system enables realtime, “out-the-window” image generation and interactive image processing.