Abstract: A floating point processor for a 3-D graphics accelerator which includes improved performance over prior art designs. The floating point processor includes three specialized engines or function units which streamline floating point operations and which provide improved performance over prior systems. In the preferred embodiment, the floating point processor comprises a floating point core (F-core), a lighting core (L-Core), and a set-up core (S-core). Computations for triangles and vectors are split over the three function units for improved efficiency. The F-core processor receives geometry primitive data and performs floating point operations on the received geometry data. The L-Core processor comprises a fixed point computational unit for performing lighting computations. The set-up core comprises a fixed point computational unit for performing set-up calculations for geometric primitives.