- Patent Title: Method and apparatus for graphics processing of a graphics fragment
-
Application No.: US13845604Application Date: 2013-03-18
-
Publication No.: US09965876B2Publication Date: 2018-05-08
- Inventor: Andreas Engh Halstvedt , Sean Tristram Ellis , Jorn Nystad , Sandeep Kakarlapudi
- Applicant: ARM Limited
- Applicant Address: GB Cambridge
- Assignee: Arm Limited
- Current Assignee: Arm Limited
- Current Assignee Address: GB Cambridge
- Agency: Vierra Magen Marcus LLP
- Main IPC: G06T1/20
- IPC: G06T1/20 ; G06T11/40

Abstract:
A graphics processing pipeline determines whether respective graphics processing operations, such as respective blends, respective depth tests, etc., to be performed at a stage of the graphics processing pipeline would produce the same result for each sampling point of a set of plural sampling points represented by a fragment being processed by the graphics processing pipeline. If it is determined that respective graphics processing operations would produce the same result for each of the sampling points, then only a single instance of the graphics processing operation is performed and the result of that graphics processing operation is associated with each of the sampling points. The number of instances of the graphics processing operations needed to process the set of plural sampling points which the fragment represents is reduced in comparison to conventional multisampling graphics processing techniques which perform graphics processing operations for fragments on a “per sample” basis. The determination of whether or not the same result would be produced for each sampling point of the set of plural sampling points is facilitated by providing metadata which indicates whether or not fragment data and/or stored sample data for use when processing the sampling points is the same.
Public/Granted literature
- US20140267377A1 METHODS OF AND APPARATUS FOR PROCESSING COMPUTER GRAPHICS Public/Granted day:2014-09-18
Information query