HP Vectra XW Optimization Manual page 40

The Geometric Pipeline
SETUP Operations
1 Your Personal Workstation's Performance Features
More 3D Graphics Performance
The geometric pipeline is run on the system's Pentium Pro processors,
mainly by the floating point (arithmetical) units. This pipeline is created
in software by the OpenGL Interface and performs the following
operations:
1 The starting (input) object is first broken into component polygons
(the geometric objects).
2 Each of these polygons is then translated and rotated (according to
the graphic operation) for correct positioning within 3D space.
3 The lighting, shading and texture characteristics of each object is
then calculated according to its position.
4 The output from the geometric pipeline is the component graphics
objects which will be used to create the new image.
The SETUP operations enable the OpenGL Interface to accelerate the
creation of the new displayable image by preparing the data for
rendering. The data that the SETUP creates is calculated as follows:
1 The shape and slopes of each component polygon are calculated to
give new coordinate data.
2 The delta (gradient) of each slope is then calculated to prepare the
image for conversion to a bitmap.
The SETUP data provides the basis for the software model of the new
image to be converted from a continuous (vectorial) image into a
rasterized (bitmap, or digitized) image. This enables the floating-point
data output by the geometric pipeline to be converted into the fixed-
point data required by the display. SETUP operations are run by the
graphics adapter on the geometric data returned by the processor(s).
34 English