An FPGA sprite graphics accelerator
andybrown.me.uk
An FPGA sprite graphics accelerator
1–10 of 23 posts
Re: An FPGA sprite graphics accelerator
#2Thank you for this incredibly detailed write-up. I'm really impressed by the fact that you go all the way from component selection to board layout to digital logic to firmware and software.
I have a couple of FPGA boards sitting around. I know what my next project is going to be.
Re: An FPGA sprite graphics accelerator
#3This kills the site, so here's the Google cache link:
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:andybro...
Re: An FPGA sprite graphics accelerator
#4That is awesome! I've been doing something similar for my computer trainer and it is a ton of work.
Re: An FPGA sprite graphics accelerator
#5This kills the site, so here's the Google cache link: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:andybro...
This kills the crab.
Re: An FPGA sprite graphics accelerator
#6Re: An FPGA sprite graphics accelerator
#7This is a quite nice article and an interesting project.
Related: A coworker of mine wrote a 3d accelerator with FPGA that outperforms some of the early Voodoo -era 3d accelerators. It could do higher triangle counts at a higher resolution with multisample antialiasing. The demos he had looked quite spectacular.
He is a software engineer and he gave us a very nice demo and a very enlightening presentation on how writing software differs from writing FPGA code.
Unfortunately, since we work for a GPU company, it's unlikely that he'll ever release the work to the public. There's no way the company lawyers would allow that and releasing it without consulting them first could result in him losing his job :( Despite that he did it on his own time and did not use any company IP.
Re: An FPGA sprite graphics accelerator
#8What a great writeup! It's awesome to see the process all the way from component selection, through code, to a final working demo. I'm definitely saving this for when I have time to do more hands-on FPGA learning.
Re: An FPGA sprite graphics accelerator
#9Really a great article. I always felt like the amount of resources available for FPGA circuit design is unfortunately low. That said, you can get a lot of horsepower out of an FPGA development kit.
The DE0-Nano[1] is one that I used to do a project[2] very similar to this one. It includes all the parts you'd need besides a video output (you can rig up a 15-bit RGB VGA output pretty easily[3]).
In any case, I think this sort of knowledge is very, very helpful and infinitely applicable to software developers. Great stuff.
[1] http://www.terasic.com.tw/cgi-bin/page/archive.pl?No=593
[2] https://github.com/SkylerLipthay/project-costanza
[3] http://www.lucidscience.com/pro-vga%20video%20generator-2.as...
Re: An FPGA sprite graphics accelerator
#10Nit pick:
"The top two manufacturers in the FPGA market are Xilinx and Altera. Xilinx was first off the block in the FPGA industry and has the lion’s share of the market."
"Lion's share" is a bit of an exaggeration. Market share numbers for Xilinx are in the 45%-50% range and for Altera in the 40%-45% range.
http://www.eejournal.com/archives/articles/20140225-rivalry/