Intel Corporation

Kevin Rogovin

Subramaniam M Maiyuran

Tomas G Akenine-Moller

Jon N Hasselgren

Thomas A Piazza

Peter L Doyle

Carl Jacob Munkberg

Robert L Farrell

Saurabh Sharma

Bimal Poddar

Kalyan Kumar Bhiravabhatla

Paul A Johnson

Harri Syrja

In position-only shading, two geometry pipes exist, a trimmed down version called the Cull Pipe and a full version called the Replay Pipe. Thus, the Cull Pipe executes the position shaders in parallel with the main application, but typically generates the critical results much faster as it fetches and shades only the position attribute of the vertices and avoids the rasterization as well as the rendering of pixels for the frame buffer. Furthermore, the Cull Pipe uses these critical results to compute visibility information for all the triangles whether they are culled or not. On the other hand, the Replay Pipe consumes the visibility information to skip the culled triangles and shades only the visible triangles that are finally passed to the rasterization phase. Together the two pipes can hide the long cull runs of discarded triangles and can complete the work faster in some embodiments.

Position-only shading pipeline

Growing community of inventors

Tammisaari, Finland

Kevin Rogovin