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Description

This work presents an applied research study on the real-time rendering of three-dimensional graphics on low-power microcontrollers, with the ESP32 platform as the primary target. Drawing on a comparative analysis of historical rasterization techniques used in 1980s and 1990s gaming consoles and the capabilities of modern embedded hardware; a rendering system is proposed that enables efficient polygon sorting and rasterization on systems without dedicated graphics acceleration. The project follows an experimental methodology encompassing algorithm design, cross-platform C++ implementation, and performance validation on different ESP32 models. Key technical contributions include an adapted painter's algorithm, geometry reduction techniques based on vertex visibility, and the implementation of multithreaded parallelism by leveraging the microcontroller’s multicore architecture. Benchmarking results show a significant increase in frame rate—doubling the baseline in some configurations—while maintaining low memory consumption. The findings support the feasibility of implementing simplified 3D engines in embedded environments with constrained resources. Additionally, areas for future work have been identified, such as improving thread synchronization mechanisms and integrating automated visual validation. Overall, this research lays the groundwork for new graphical applications in embedded systems, bridging historical rendering approaches with modern embedded development

Publication Date

2025

Publisher

UDIT

City

Madrid

Keywords

3D graphics, Microcontrollers, ESP32, Rasterization, Parallelism, Painter's algorithm, Embedded rendering, Low-power computing, Resource optimization, Lightweight graphics engines

Optimización de técnicas de renderizado tridimensional en microcontroladores de bajo consumo: aplicación sobre la plataforma ESP32 (2025)

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