Workstation graphics-rendering hardware

Graphics rendering architecture suffers from at least three major performance bottlenecks which limit the interactive display of 3D photorealistic graphics databases. The performance bottlenecks are graphics database traversal, the pixel computation rate of a single graphics oriented processor and the frame buffer access rate of a conventional frame buffer. The authors look at solutions for increasing the pixel computation rate. Pixel computation rate is directly related to the design of the geometry and rasterization architectures of the graphics rendering system. The goal is to design geometry and rasterization hardware and software that accelerates the floating point processing requirements of object space algorithms and pixel processing requirements of image space algorithms