Hardware-accelerated gradient noise for graphics

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Hardware-accelerated gradient noise for graphics

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Great Lakes Symposium on VLSI archive
Proceedings of the 19th ACM Great Lakes symposium on VLSI table of contents

Boston Area, MA, USA

SESSION: VLSI design table of contents

Pages 457-462

Year of Publication: 2009

ISBN:978-1-60558-522-2

Authors

Josef B. Spjut	University of Utah, Salt Lake City, UT, USA
Andrew E. Kensler	University of Utah, Salt Lake City, UT, USA
Erik L. Brunvand	University of Utah, Salt Lake City, UT, USA

Sponsors

ACM: Association for Computing Machinery
SIGDA: ACM Special Interest Group on Design Automation

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ACM New York, NY, USA

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ABSTRACT

A synthetic noise function is a key component of most computer graphics rendering systems. This pseudo-random noise function is used to create a wide variety of natural looking textures that are applied to objects in the scene. To be useful, the generated noise should be repeatable while exhibiting no discernible periodicity, anisotropy, or aliasing. However, noise with these qualities is computationally expensive and results in a significant fraction of the run time for scenes with rich visual complexity. We propose modifications to the standard algorithm for computing synthetic noise that improve the visual quality of the noise, and a parallel hardware implementation of this improved noise function that allows the use of reduced precision arithmetic during the noise computation. The result is a special-purpose function unit for producing synthetic noise that computes high-quality noise values approximately two orders of magnitude faster than software techniques. The circuit, using a commercial CMOS cell library in a 65nm process, would run at 1GHz and consume 325μm x 325μm of chip area.

REFERENCES

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