Raster Manager

A board that slots into an Infinite Reality that manages rasterisation.

The function of the Raster Memory board is to perform rasterization. It also contains the texture memory and raster memory, which is more commonly known as the framebuffer. Rasterization is performed in the Fragment Generator and the eighty Image Engines. The Fragment Generator comprises four ASIC designs: the Scan Converter (SC) ASIC, the Texel Address Calculator (TA) ASIC, the Texture Memory Controller (TM) ASIC and the Texture Fragment (TF) ASIC.

The SC ASIC and the TA ASIC perform scan conversion, color and depth interpolation, perspective correct texture coordinate interpolation and level of detail computation on incoming data, and the results are passed to the eight TM ASICs, which are specialized memory controllers optimized for texel access. Each TM ASIC controls four SDRAMs that make up one-eighth of the texture memory. The SDRAMs used are 16 bits wide and have separate address and data buses. SDRAMs with a capacity of 4 Mb are used by Raster Manager boards with 16 MB of texture memory while 16 Mb SDRAMs are used by Raster Manager boards with 64 MB of texture memory. The TM ASICs perform texel lookups in its SDRAMs according to the texel addresses issued by the TA ASIC. Texels from the TM ASICs are forwarded to the appropriate TF ASIC, where texture filtering, texture environment combination with interpolated color and fog application is performed. As each SDRAM holds part of the texture memory, all of the 32 SDRAMs must be connected to all of the 80 Image Engines. To achieve this, the TM and TF ASICs implement a two-rank omega network, which reduces the number of individual paths required for the 32 to 80 sort while maintaining the same functionality.

The eighty Image Engines have multiple functions. Firstly, each Image Engine controls a portion of the raster memory, which in the case of the InfiniteReality, is a 1 MB SGRAM organized as 262,144 by 32-bit words. Secondly, the following OpenGL per-fragment operations are performed by the Image Engines: pixel ownership test, stencil test, depth buffer test, blending, dithering and logical operation. Lastly, the Image Engines perform anti-aliasing and accumulation buffer operations. To deliver pixel data for display, each Image Engine has a 2-bit serial bus to the Display Generator board. If one Raster Manager board is present in the pipeline, the Image Engine uses the entire width of the bus, whereas if two or more Raster Manager boards are present, the Image Engine uses half the bus. Each serial bus is actually a part of the Video Bus, which has a bandwidth of 1.2 GB/s. Four Image Engine "cores" are contained on an Image Engine ASIC, which contains nearly 488,000 logic gates, comprising 1.95 million transistors, on a 42 mm² (6.5 by 6.5 mm) die that was fabricated in a 0.35 micrometre process by VLSI Technology.

The InfiniteReality uses the RM6-16 or RM6-64 Raster Managers. Each pipeline is capable of display resolutions of 2.62, 5.24 or 10.48 million pixels, provided that one, two or four Raster Manager boards respectively are present.Onyx2 Reality, Onyx2 InfiniteReality and Onyx2 InfiniteReality2 Technical Report, August 1998. Silicon Graphics, Inc. The raster memory can be configured to use 256, 512 or 1024 bits per pixel. 320 MB supports a resolution of 2560 by 2048 pixels with each pixel containing 512 bits of information. In a configuration with four Raster Managers, the texture memory has a bandwidth of 15.36 GB/s, and the raster memory has a bandwidth of 72.8 GB/s.