Hardware Development of Sphere Intersection in Ray-casting Using High-Level-Synthesis

Game applications that require high graphics performance have a large processing load, which greatly affects the running time of battery-driven mobile terminals. Mobile terminals that support dynamic partial reconfiguration of hardware can perform high-performance and low-power graphics processing through power-efficient hardware execution, rather than software. This paper develops hardware for the intersection determination process in ray-casting, which is utilized in the creation of high-graphic game applications. In the development, the HLS, which is an automated software-to-hardware conversion tool is used. We developed the software of intersection determination process so that the HLS can generate small-resource-usage, high-performance, and power-efficient hardware. Intersection determination of ray-casting is carried out by vector and square root calculation. Usually, these calculations are executed in floating-point operation. However, this operation method tends to increase the size of the circuit because it requires a great deal of resources when implemented hardware. It is not desirable due to a huge circuit size means high power consumption. Therefore, this paper shows an optimal method in vector and square root calculations using fixed point, while considering its accuracy. Also, through demonstrations on actual machines, we evaluate its usefulness in terms of performance, circuit size and power efficiency.