Intel® 945G/945GZ/945GC/ 945P/945PL Express Chipset Family ...

Functional Description
Figure 10-6. Integrated 3D Graphics Pipeline
10.5.2 3D Engine
240
Processor
Geometry:
Transform and Lighting, Vertex Shader
GMCH
Setup Engine:
Vertices in, Pixels out
Texture Engine:
Pixels in, Textured Pixels out
Raster Engine:
Textured Pixels in, Final Pixels out
3D-Gfx_Pipeline
The 3D engine on the GMCH has been designed with a deep pipelined architecture, where
performance is maximized by allowing each stage of the pipeline to simultaneously operate on
different primitives or portions of the same primitive. The GMCH supports Perspective-Correct
Texture Mapping, Multitextures, Bump-Mapping, Cubic Environment Maps, Bilinear, Trilinear
and Anisotropic MIP mapped filtering, Gouraud shading, Alpha-blending, Vertex and Per Pixel
Fog and Z/W Buffering.
The 3D pipeline subsystem performs the 3D rendering acceleration. The main blocks of the
pipline are the setup engine, scan converter, texture pipeline, and raster pipeline. A typical
programming sequence would be to send instructions to set the state of the pipeline followed by
rending instructions containing 3D primitive vertex data.
The engines’ performance is dependent on the memory bandwidth available. Systems that have
more bandwidth available will outperform systems with less bandwidth. The engines’
performance is also dependent on the core clock frequency. The higher the frequency, the more
data is processed.