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Our research group is pursuing a “vertically integrated” approach to real-time 3-D graphics systems research. Our work spans graphics algorithms, software systems, and hardware architectures, as well as the interaction between these system layers.

We are exploring new system designs for real-time graphics that: Allow the use of visibility algorithms that are better than the traditional Z-buffer.

• Examples of this approach include our irregular Z buffer work, and various forms of raytracing that we are exploring.
• Efficiently support the creation, modification, and traversal of adaptive data structures such as linked lists and kd-trees.
• Efficiently support a wide variety of parallel algorithms.

Our architectural focus is on single-chip parallel architectures. Our graphics focus is on complex, real-time scenes containing moving and deformable objects. Almost all of our projects require innovations in both graphics algorithms and hardware architectures.

The needs of real-time 3-D graphics are likely to drive the future evolution of commodity parallel architectures. Fortunately, we anticipate that the architectural capabilities needed to support our real-time graphics goals will be sufficiently general that future graphics-oriented architectures will be useful for a broad variety of other parallelizable computations. Thus, we believe that we are in effect designing the commodity general-purpose parallel computer architecture of the future.