3D rendering and the FPGA connection

What do Coraline, Ice Age, the X Games, and Virtex have in common? They all are better in 3D. Hats off to Ars Technica for this pointer to a new paper in Optics Letters, describing use of the Xilinx FPGAs in 3D rendering. Just as FPGAs have displaced DSPs and integer CPUs in many applications in recent years, they can now take on the heavy-lifting graphics engines.

The paper describes research in Japan at developing a graphics card, HORN-6, which can ease development of holograms by dividing processing tasks among four FPGAs. No 3D glasses necessary. As Ars Technica mentioned, the PDF download at the  Optics Letters site has some cool examples of the holography accomplished.