Graphics Accelerators: A Review

Abstract

The spreadability of large and diverse computer graphics applications, highly powerful and diversified programmable hardware platforms, rapid advances in their programing techniques have all permitted design different hardware accelerators for many applications. Whereas a rapid increase in graphics performance accelerators has made them a compelling platform for computational demands tasks in a wide variety of application domains. Therefore, graphics accelerators have attracted us because of their important applications in our daily life. This paper tries to achieve those goals through a regular review of similar studies within this field of research. The process started by intensely surfing the famous specialized digital libraries and, as a result, 40 related papers were collected and examined upon several important technical subjects: technical motivations that underlie the chosen graphics algorithm, software developments that have led to the interest in this graphics algorithm, hardware platform used, programming tool, and the design intended for 2D or 3D graphics. We believe that the software techniques presented in this paper will be helpful for researchers who plan to develop new graphics accelerators algorithms. Also, it gives the required introductions in developing hardware graphics accelerators and help select materials, techniques, and tools.