Development of a fixed pipeline GPU on FPGA

Abstract

In recent years, a lot of research has been carried out to study on how feasible it is to implement GPU on FPGA. Besides that, fixed pipeline GPU has been the main choice for the graphic card vendor nowadays for example nVidia and AMD, and it has been a driving force for us to come out with the idea to have fixed pipeline GPU as a method of implementation into FPGA. In this project, a fixed pipeline GPU has been implemented on Altera Cyclone II FPGA. A fixed point of 12 coordinates undergo a series of fixed pipeline transformation to obtain a 3D Pyramid like polygon. One of the strong points for this project is on the rasterization module, where it does not require any buffer and hence extra buffer can be used to perform other tasks for daily usage. The floating point implementation is being done by using fixed point binary. Furthermore, we are able to prove that FPGA implemented GPU is able to outperform software rendered Direct3D in term of the FPS rate. The final result of the project is a rotation of 3D polygon where we are able to perform translation, rotation speed control, eye point control and look to point control.