Overall teaching objectives:
Students should understand the fundamental principles upon which contemporary graphics hardware operates, the underlying mathematical formulations and algorithms, and the advantages of rasterization over ray-casting. They must understand he design decisions leading to the current graphics pipeline, its structure, and its data flow.
Motivation and relation to other modules:
The extraordinary growth of the perfromace of 3D gaphics adapters is due to a a formidable engineerign effort, but is the direct result of a set of interdependent design decisions. Students must understand these decisions, so that they are able to questions them when exploring new architectures or analyzing performance bottlnecks.