David II: A new architecture for parallel rendering processors with effective memory system

Current rendering processors are organized mainly to process a triangle as fast as possible and recently parallel 3D rendering processors, which can process multiple triangles in parallel with multiple rasterizers, begin to appear. For high performance in processing triangles, it is desirable for each rasterizer have its own local pixel cache. However, the consistency problem may occur in accessing the data at the same address simultaneously by more than one rasterizer. In this paper, we propose a parallel rendering processor architecture, called DAVID II, resolving such consistency problem effectively. Moreover, the proposed architecture reduces the latency due to a pixel cache miss significantly. The experimental results show that DAVID II achieves almost linear speedup at best case even in sixteen rasterizers.