Talisman

Abstract

A new 3D graphics and multimedia hardware architecture, codenamed Talisman, is described which exploits both spatial and temporal coherence to reduce the cost of high quality animation. Individually animated objects are rendered into independent image layers which are composited together at video refresh rates to create the final display. During the compositing process, a full affine transformation is applied to the layers to allow translation, rotation, scaling and skew to be used to simulate 3D motion of objects, thus providing a multiplier on 3D rendering performance and exploiting temporal image coherence. Image compression is broadly exploited for textures and image layers to reduce image capacity and bandwidth requirements. Performance rivaling highend 3D graphics workstations can be achieved at a cost point of two to three hundred dollars.