The dsp3D is a powerful 3D rendering engine designed for ARM Cortex-M processor based devices. It takes full advantage of the CMSIS DSP library to provide a fast operation. The presence of the floating point unit is necessary, better if it is double precision
The engine supports surface colors (one color per surface) and four rendering methods are available:
- Gouraud rendering
- Flat surface rendering
- Wireframe rendering
- Point rendering
The performance is directly dependent on the memory access speed and the math acceleration. Since the engine is really RAM hungry (consider about 8 bytes per pixel in ARGB rendering), I used boards with external SDRAM.
The STM32F769I-Discovery has a 32 bits bus to the external SDRAM and a double precision floating point unit, so that it performed better than the other platforms.
The engine were successfully tested on:
- ST's STM32F746G-Discovery board (MCU: STM32F746) - Cortex-M7 @ 216MHz - 480x272 display
- ST's STM32F769I-Discovery board (MCU: STM32F769) - Cortex-M7 @ 200MHz - 800x480 display
- ST's STM32F429I-Discovery board (MCU: STM32F429) - Cortex-M4 @ 180MHz - 240x320 display
I made two demos to see on YouTube:
dsp3D - A power 3D rendering engine with hardware acceleration
dsp3D - A power 3D rendering engine with hardware acceleration (multi demo)