Real-time shaded colour polygon generation system

The paper describes a hardware architecture for a graphics system which can generate shaded, colour, perspective 2-dimensional images of complex 3-dimensional scenes, in real time. The architecture is capable of operating at the high pixel rates required to produce scenes on rasterscan displays with high spatial resolution (1280 H by 1024 V), high colour resolution (24-bit), and high refresh rate (60 Hz non-interlaced). The architecture of the pixel rate section is described in detail. The architecture is suitable for implementation using custom VLSI techniques.