2 Load-balanced Rendering on a General-Purpose Tiled Architecture

Commodity graphics hardware has become increasingly programmable over the last few years, but has been limited to a fixed resource allocation. These architectures handle some workloads well, others poorly; load-balancing to maximize graphics hardware performance has become a critical issue. I have designed a system that solves the load-balancing problem in real-time graphics by using compile-time resource allocation on general-purpose hard-ware. I implemented a flexible graphics pipeline on Raw, a tile-based multicore processor. The complete graphics pipeline is expressed using StreamIt, a high-level language based on the stream programming model. The StreamIt compiler automatically maps the stream computation onto the Raw architecture. The system is evaluated by comparing the perfor-mance of the flexible pipeline with a fixed allocation representative of commodity hardware on common rendering tasks. The benchmarks place workloads on different parts of the pipeline to determine the effectiveness of the load-balance. The flexible pipeline achieves up to twice the throughput of a static allocation