A Run-Time Reconfigurable Fabric for 3D Texture Filtering

To reduce area of texture filter for real-time rendering is challenging as user demand for 3-D scene realism increases. This work presents a low-area run-time reconfigurable texture filter design given certain performance requirement. A texture filter is a part of a texture unit. The reconfiguration is on a number of bilinear filters as basic function blocks, can be implemented within individual texture unit or across multiple texture units, and is based on hierarchical decomposition of all kinds of filtering algorithms. Two reconfiguration designs are proposed and examined: The self-content design, in which a texture unit must be equipped with all necessary hardware to deal with all different filtering algorithms; and the sharable design, in which texture units can share their texture filters (and the total amount of useable texture units may thus change). Experimental results show that the sharable design achieves a 12% area reduction, as compared with the self-content design.