RCP (chip) - Reality Display Processor

Reality Display Processor

The RDP is programmed by use of display lists. A display list contains a series of commands (each of variable size) which give instructions to the RDP and control its operating state. The RDP is capable of rendering shaded, textured and depth buffered geometry to an arbitrary frame buffer in main memory. The RDP contains 4KB of on-chip TMEM (texture memory) in which the RDP can reference up to eight textures (so called, "tiles") at any given time. The size of the available texture memory may be reduced further if using texture lookup tables (TLUT), since the high 2KB will be used to store the lookup tables. This texture memory limitation is widely considered a design flaw of the RDP.