Nvidia Corporation

Don Bittel

Jerome Francis Duluk, Jr

Curtis R Priem

Mark J Kilgard

Dale L Kirkland

Rui Manuel Bastos

Christian Rouet

Christian Amsinck

William Craig McKnight

Pierre Souillot

Joseph Detmer

A technique for efficiently rendering content reduces each complex blend mode to a series of basic blend operations. The series of basic blend operations are executed within a recirculating pipeline until a final blended value is computed. The recirculating pipeline is positioned within a color raster operations unit of a graphics processing unit for efficient access to image buffer data.

Programmable blending in multi-threaded processing units

A method, apparatus and article of manufacture are provided for minimizing the number of look-ups in a page table entry (PTE) data structure during mapping of virtual addresses to physical addresses when the physical addresses consist of contiguous addresses. First, a primary virtual address in a PTE data structure is accessed for mapping physical memory. Next, it is determined whether a primary physical address corresponding to the accessed primary virtual address is associated with a physical page having at least one contiguous physical page. If it is determined that such contiguous physical page exists, information relating to both the primary virtual address and any virtual and physical contiguous addresses in the PTE data structure is retrieved in a single look-up.

Method, apparatus and article of manufacture for mapping physical memory in a virtual address system

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San Jose, CA, United States of America

Don Bittel