A Reconfigurable Architecture for Load-Balanced Rendering

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. In this paper, we explore one solution to this problem using compile-time resource allocation. For our experiments, we implement a graphics pipeline on Raw, a tile-based multicore processor. We express both the full graphics pipeline and the shaders using StreamIt, a high-level language based on the stream programming model. The StreamIt compiler maps the stream computation onto the Raw architecture. We evaluate our reconfigurable architecture using a mix of common rendering tasks with different workloads and achieve an increase of more than 150 % in throughput over a static allocation. Although our early prototype cannot compete in performance against commercial state-of-the-art graphics processors, we believe that this paper describes an important first step in addressing the load-balancing challenge