GPU Project 09 – Rotations

Sorry for the long delay between posts. Being a hobby project usually this takes low priority when other things are urgent. And actually, there have been many advances lately but I haven’t had the chance to post them. Lets go through these in order.

Although we have a fair point cloud rendering in place it really is not that useful unless we can move and rotate objects. For that purpose we have the object transform block highlighted below in red:

The idea is that we can have a list of object specific parameters in a BRAM that the block will use to alter the vertex stream:

  • number of vertices in the object
  • position
  • rotation

The block will take in vertices from the vertex pump, rotate them around the object’s axis and then add the object’s position as an offset to each vertex. The position part is actually quite simple since we only have to do an addition on each axis. The rotation part, well… no so much.

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GPU Project 08 – Point cloud rendering in FPGA

After successfully running the simulation, its time to see how the rendering works on the real HW. And as always, SW needs to be written to get the HW to know what to do. In this case, I will be loading the vertex data of a cube into memory to see it transformed, and then experiment with the same teapot data that I used in the C# version the app.

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GPU Project 07 – Simulating the design

In order to see if the design is working before committing to a full build in the FPGA I wanted to simulate it to see if it could render just a few pixels and return sensible pixel locations. There are of course lots of different complicated ways of doing this, some quite elaborated, but I just wanted to functionally verify the design in the shortest amount of time (this is a hobby project after all). So, I opted o use Xilinx BFMs. These are IP cores that can generate different kinds of traffic on AXI buses. Here’s the testbench that I created:

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