3DCGiRAM: An intelligent memory architecture for photo-realistic image synthesis

This paper proposes an intelligent memory architecture for photo-realistic image synthesis, named 3DCGiRAM. The 3DCGiRAM has a hardware-accelerated 3D line generator, which finds objects that are likely to intersect traced rays. It also has functional memory cells, each of which is composed of graphics logic and its local memory to detect intersecting objects and to calculate intensities. A distributed frame buffer is employed to alleviate the access conflicts of functional cells to the frame buffer as well as to compose globally illuminated intensities at screen pixels. As the graphics processing capability is localized to data in the 3DCGiRAM through memory-logic merged LSI technology, a scalability and modularity similar to those of conventional memory modules can be expected. The experimental results show that a single 3DCGiRAM module running at 200MHz with a memory bandwidth of 6.4GB will be able to synthesize a ray-traced walk-through animation at a rate of one frame per second.