Nvidia Corporation

Joseph Detmer

Rui Manuel Bastos

William Craig McKnight

Jerome Francis Duluk, Jr

Steven E Molnar

Mark J Kilgard

Dale L Kirkland

David Kirk McAllister

Christian Rouet

Christian Amsinck

Narayan Kulshrestha

Jonathan J Dunaisky

Pierre Souillot

Don Bittel

A method for compressing framebuffer data is presented. The method includes determining a reduction ratio for framebuffer data in a tile including multiple samples. The reduction ratio determined is independent of the sampling mode, where the sampling mode is the number of samples within each pixel in the tile. The method further includes comparing a first portion of the framebuffer data for each of the multiple samples to determine an equality comparison result and also comparing a second portion of the framebuffer data for each one of the multiple samples to compute per-channel differences for each one of the multiple samples and testing the per-channel differences against a threshold value to determine a threshold comparison result. Finally, the method comprises compressing the framebuffer data for the tile based on the reduction ratio, the equality comparison result and the threshold comparison result to produce output framebuffer data for the tile.

Alternate reduction ratios and threshold mechanisms for framebuffer compression

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

Growing community of inventors

Durham, NC, United States of America

Joseph Detmer