A Simple , Flexible , Parallel Graphics Architecture

Traditional graphics hardware architectures, with their emphasis on the graphics pipeline, are becoming less useful. As graphics algorithms evolve and grow more capable, it becomes much harder to implement them in silicon. By using general-purpose hardware technology effectively, one can build powerful graphics hardware that is very flexible, yet inexpensive. In this paper we would like to discuss one such architecture that allows for both traditional interactive graphics (polygon scan conversion) as well as more advanced graphics (ray tracing and radiosity).