Comparing Reyes and OpenGL on a Stream Architecture

John D. Owens, Brucek Khailany, Brian Towles, and William J. Dally
Stanford University
Computer Systems Laboratory

Appears in the Proceedings of the 2002 Eurographics/SIGGRAPH Workshop on Graphics Hardware, Saarbrücken, Germany, September 1-2, 2002, pp. 47-56.

Abstract:

The OpenGL and Reyes rendering pipelines each render complex scenes from similar scene descriptions but differ in their internal pipeline organizations. While the OpenGL organization has dominated hardware architectures over the past twenty years, a Reyes organization differs in several important ways from OpenGL, including a shader coordinate system that supports coherent texture accesses, a single shader in the vertex stage, and tessellation and sampling instead of triangle rasterization.

Hardware for the OpenGL pipeline has been well-studied, but the lack of a hardware Reyes implementation has prevented a comparison between the two pipelines. We analyze and compare implementations of an OpenGL and a Reyes pipeline on the Imagine stream processor, a high performance programmable processor for media applications. This comparison both demonstrates the applicability of Reyes for hardware implementation and exposes many issues that architects will face in implementing Reyes in hardware, in particular the need for efficient subdivision algorithms and implementations.

Paper

Reference

John D. Owens, Brucek Khailany, Brian Towles, and William J. Dally. Comparing Reyes and OpenGL on a Stream Architecture. In 2002 SIGGRAPH / Eurographics Workshop on Graphics Hardware, pages 47-56, September 2002.

BibTeX entry

@InProceedings{Owens:2002:CRA,
   author = {John D. Owens and Brucek Khailany and Brian Towles and 
             William J. Dally},
   title = {Comparing {R}eyes and {OpenGL} on a Stream Architecture},
   booktitle = {2002 SIGGRAPH / Eurographics Workshop on Graphics Hardware},
   year = 2002,
   month = sep,
   pages = {47--56},
   OPTpublisher = {ACM SIGGRAPH / Eurographics / ACM Press},

   annote = {The OpenGL and Reyes rendering pipelines each render
             complex scenes from similar scene descriptions but differ
             in their internal pipeline organizations. While the
             OpenGL organization has dominated hardware architectures
             over the past twenty years, a Reyes organization differs
             in several important ways from OpenGL, including a shader
             coordinate system that supports coherent texture
             accesses, a single shader in the vertex stage, and
             tessellation and sampling instead of triangle
             rasterization.

             Hardware for the OpenGL pipeline has been well-studied,
             but the lack of a hardware Reyes implementation has
             prevented a comparison between the two pipelines. We
             analyze and compare implementations of an OpenGL and a
             Reyes pipeline on the Imagine stream processor, a high
             performance programmable processor for media
             applications. This comparison both demonstrates the
             applicability of Reyes for hardware implementation and
             exposes many issues that architects will face in
             implementing Reyes in hardware, in particular the need
             for efficient subdivision algorithms and implementations.
             },
}

John Owens