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by danbruc
813 days ago
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If you are going to that effort, you might also want a decent resolution. Say we aim for one megapixel (720p) and 30 frames per second, then we have to calculate 27.7 megapixel per second. If you get your FPGA to run at 500 MHz, that gives you 18 clock cycles per pixel. So you would probably want something like 100 cores keeping in mind that we also have to run vertex shaders. We also need quick access to a sizable amount of memory and I am not sure if one can get away with integer respectively fixed point arithmetics or whether floating point arithemtics is pretty much necessary. Another complication that I would expect is that it is probably much easier to build a long execution pipeline if you are implementing a fixed function pipeline as compared to a programmable processor. Things like out-of-order execution are probably best off-loaded to the compiler in order to keep the design simpler and more compact. So my guess is that it would be quite challenging to implement a modern GPU in an affordable FPGA if you want more than a proof of concept. |
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I do not doubt that a shader core could be built, but I have reservations about the ability to run it fast enough or have as many of them as would be needed to get similar performance out of them. FuryGpu does its front-end (everything up through primitive assembly) in full fp32. Because that's just a simple fixed modelview-projection matrix transform it can be done relatively quickly, but having every single vertex/pixel able to run full fp32 shader instructions requires the ability to cover instruction latency with additional data sets - it gets complicated, fast!