Patch Renderer: a new parallel hardware architecture for fast polygon rendering

A special purpose hardware is described which is called Patch Renderer for fast polygon rendering. Patch Renderer has 64 VIMUs (vertical interpolation and masking units), where each VIMU processes a span having 64 consecutive pixels, and processes a 64×64 pixel area, called a pixel patch, at a time. The processing power of each VIMU comes from the bit-serial quadratic interpolator which performs the quadratic interpolation of the functional values such as color intensity values at all pixels within the given span. Its quadratic feature enables the authors to use the Fast Phong Shading, which produces more realistic images than Gouraud shading. The estimated performance of Patch Renderer is about 360000 Fast Phong-Shaded triangles per second at 40 MHz