Nvidia Corporation

Karl M Wurstner

Emmett Michael Kilgariff

Dale L Kirkland

Johnny S Rhoades

Cynthia Ann Edgeworth Allison

Ziyad Sami Hakura

Steven E Molnar

Sean Jeffrey Treichler

Karim Abdalla

Timothy John Purcell

Gernot Schaufler

One embodiment of the present invention sets forth a technique for redistributing geometric primitives generated by tessellation and geometry shaders for per-vertex by multiple graphics pipelines. Geometric primitives that are generated in a first processing stage are collected and redistributed more evenly and in smaller batches to the multiple graphics pipelines for vertex processing in a second processing stage. The smaller batches do not exceed the resource limits of a graphics pipeline and the per-vertex processing workloads of the graphics pipelines in the second stage are balanced. Therefore, the performance of the tessellation and geometry shaders is improved.

Redistribution of generated geometric primitives

One embodiment of the present invention sets forth a technique for using a shared memory to store hardware-managed virtual buffers. A circular buffer is allocated within a general-purpose multi-use cache for storage of primitive attribute data rather than having a dedicated buffer for the storage of the primitive attribute data. The general-purpose multi-use cache is also configured to store other graphics data sinces the space requirement for primitive attribute data storage is highly variable, depending on the number of attributes and the size of primitives. Entries in the circular buffer are allocated as needed and released and invalidated after the primitive attribute data has been consumed. An address to the circular buffer entry is transmitted along with primitive descriptors from object-space processing to the distributed processing in screen-space.

Hardware-managed virtual buffers using a shared memory for load distribution

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Madison, AL, United States of America

Karl M Wurstner