Arm Limited

Alexander Galazin

Andreas Danner Nilsen

Brian Pearson

Andreas Due Engh-Halstvedt

Michel Iwaniec

Joerg Wagner

Ting Wei

Jörg Wagner

Sergey Solovyev

A graphics processing system groups plural initial pilot shader programs into a set of initial pilot shader programs and associates the set of initial pilot shader programs with a set of indexes. The initial pilot shader programs each contain constant program expressions to be executed on behalf of an original shader program. The index for an initial pilot shader program is then used to obtain the instructions contained in the initial pilot shader program for executing the constant program expressions of the initial pilot shader program. The threads for executing a subset of the initial pilot shader programs are also grouped into a thread group and the threads of the thread group are executed in parallel. The graphics processing system provides for efficient preparation and execution of plural initial pilot shader programs.

Methods and systems for grouping and executing initial pilot shader programs

A set of primitives is divided into plural sub-sets of primitives, and a tree representation for representing the set of primitives in which each leaf node of the tree represents one of the sub-sets, and each parent node of the tree represents a sub-set of primitives corresponding to the combination of the sub-sets of primitives of all of its child nodes, is generated. For each node of the tree representation data indicating: the sub-set of primitives that the node represents; the vertices that are used by the primitives in the sub-set of primitives that the node represents; and the volume of space that the sub-set of primitives that the node represents falls within, is determined. The tree representation is then used to determine a set of primitives and a set of vertices to be processed when processing the set of primitives for the output frame.

Tree-based graphics primitive rendering

In a graphics processing system that includes one or more programmable shading stages, the shader compiler receives a shader program to be compiled (step), identifies any run time constant expressions in the shader program (step), and removes such expressions from the original shader program, and substitutes them in the original main shader program with appropriate load instructions pointing to where the output results from a pilot shader program will be stored (step). The shader compiler then creates a separate pilot shader program for the identified run-time constant expressions (step). The pilot shader program is then executed on the graphics processing pipeline (step), before the modified main shader program (step).

Graphics processing

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Trondheim, Norway

Alexander Galazin