Real Time Fractal Flame Rendering.

(Dec 2012 - June 2013)

Iterated Functions are a broad class of mathematical equations with interesting properties when applied iteratively at some initial data. The Mandelbrot set (and Julia set) is based on iterated functions. However, there are large classes of iterated functions which remain largely unexplored, and due to their computational complexity they are very suitable for hardware acceleration. In this work we have developed a real-time fractal flame rendering algorithm. The algorithm was designed and fully implemented on an ALTERA DE2-115 FPGA board with HDMI output. The implemented system produces 200,000,000 points per second, vs. 1,280,000 in highly optimized software in C, yielding a speedup of ~156x. This is the first FPGA-based flame rendering implementation to our knowledge, and the results are very promising for further study.

Our design was ranked at the first place of the “Most Impressive use of an FPGA” category of the ALTERA Innovate Europe Contest 2012-2013 and it was presented with a Demo and a Poster at the 23rd International Conference on Field Programmable Logic and Applications.