S3 Graphics Co., Ltd.

Lin Chen

Konstantine I Iourcha

Zhou Hong

Mike Hong

A system and method is provided for mipmap texturing in which texture tiles are mapped into sets of a set-associative texture cache for use in displaying a graphic primitive. When a miss occurs, a new texture tile is called from main memory to replace a texture tile which is not shared between the segment being traversed and the next segment to be traversed and which is the &ldquo;least recently used&rdquo;. This is accomplished by maintaining a record for each cache line describing the texture tile it contains and replacing the texture tile which is the &ldquo;least likely to be reused&rdquo;.

System for low miss rate replacement of texture cache lines

A system and method for implementing a z-range buffer during the generation and display of three-dimensional graphical images. The display screen is partitioned into a plurality of display blocks. For each display block, the z-range buffer stores minimum and maximum depth values (z-values) of a front layer of the block and a back layer of the block. The z-range buffer further stores a bitmask value where each bit in the bitmask associates a pixel in the block to either the front layer or the back layer. When a new triangle is to be displayed, the minimum and/or maximum z-values of the pixels of the triangle are compared with the minimum and/or maximum z-values of the front layer and/or the back layer. By making such z-comparisons, it is often possible to make generalizations of the z-values of the remaining pixels in the triangle without individually analyzing their z-values.

Growing community of inventors

Fremont, CA, United States of America

Lin Chen