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Register Combiners

A faster technique for normalization without using texture maps is to use the register combiners extension [11]. With register combiners only addition, subtraction, multiplication and dot products are possible (Section 3.3). Direct computation of the normalization equation shown in Formula 4 is not possible. Given that the vector $ \vec{v}$ is derived from the interpolation of a unit-length vector across the polygon and the angle between the per-vertex vectors is not too big, this expression can be approximated by a Taylor series (Formula 5).

$\displaystyle \vec{v}^{\prime}=\vec{v}\left( 1-\frac{1}{2}(\vec{v}\cdot\vec{v}-...
...ac{5}{16}(\vec{v}\cdot\vec{v}<tex2html_comment_mark>49 -1)^{3}+\ldots\right)%%
$ (5)

Given the assumptions mentioned above and the limited 8 bit precision in the register combiners this expressions is truncated after the linear term (Formula 6).

$\displaystyle \vec{v}^{\prime}\widetilde{=}\frac{\vec{v}}{2}(3-\vec{v}\cdot\vec{v})=\vec {v}+0.5\vec{v}(1-\vec{v}\cdot\vec{v})%%
$ (6)

The last expression can be implemented directly with register combiner arithmetic in two general combiner stages.



Gerald Schröcker 2002-03-21