Texture Details

January 1996 / Reviews / 3-D Without RISC / Texture Details

Texture mapping adds realism to 3-D displays by draping 2-D patterns, such as wood grain or a Landsat image, over 3-D surfaces. Ideally, it adjusts the patterns for perspective and surface shading. More capable workstations keep texture maps readily available in dedicated memory within the graphics subsystem. Texture mapping can then move quickly into a rendered image without bogging down the hos t system. Several of Intergraph's GLZ graphics cards, for example, store 8 or 32 MB of texture data and pipe it to the image midway through the rendering process via a 64-bit, 256-MBps graphics bus.
Though fast, dedicated texture memory is costly and limits image size for some applications. Storing texture data in system memory extends texture storage. Using OpenGL texture-object extensions, Intergraph's texture-processing hardware can store large texture maps in system memory and use the dedicated texture memory as a cache, moving data between the two areas over the relatively fast Peripheral Component Interconnect (PCI) bus.

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Matthew Wilson
My approach to software engineering is far more pragmatic than it is theoretical--and no language better exemplifies this than C++.

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