Nvidia Corporation

Matthew J Craighead

Steven E Molnar

Michael J M Toksvig

Rui Bastos

Ross Cunniff

John Stephen Montrym

Mark J Kilgard

Edward Anthony Hutchins

Cass Watson Everitt

Douglas A Voorhies

Franklin C Crow

A graphics processing subsystem defines a bounding area as the portion of the display buffer and other memory buffers occupied by one or more rendered objects. When clearing the memory buffers, only the portions of the buffers corresponding to the bounding area need to be cleared. A graphics pipeline includes a bounding area memory to store bounding area values. The bounding area values are modified during rendering so that each rendered primitive falls within the bounding area values. The graphics processing subsystem clears a portion of the memory buffer in response to a clear command specifying a bounding area. The clear command may include a set of bounding area values defining the bounding area, or alternatively a reference to the bounding area memory. For applications that draw objects in isolation, the bounding area will be smaller than the window, resulting in a decreased time requirement for clearing the memory buffer.

Faster clears for three-dimensional modeling applications

Hybrid sampling of pixels of an image involves generating shading values at multiple shading sample locations and generating depth values at multiple depth sample locations, with the number of depth sample locations exceeding the number of shading sample locations. Each shading sample location is associated with one or more of the depth sample locations. Generation and filtering of hybrid sampled pixel data can be done within a graphics processing system, transparent to an application that provides image data.

Antialiasing using hybrid supersampling-multisampling

Transferring data between a requesting program and a hardware device. An program requests a pre-allocation of non-pageable memory. The program requests a transfer via a direct memory access (DMA) from the hardware device into the non-pageable memory. The requesting program is notified when the DMA is complete. The requesting program reads the data from the non-pageable memory. A determination may be made whether a range of addresses specified in the DMA request is within the pre-allocated range of non-pageable memory. If the range of addresses is within the pre-allocated non-pageable memory, the data transfer involves fewer transfers between system memory and the CPU than if the range of addresses is outside the pre-allocated non-pageable memory.

Method and system for transferring data between a requesting program and a hardware device

A system and method are provided for conditional branching in a hardware graphics pipeline. Initially, a plurality of graphics commands is received. Condition data is then affected based on at least some of the graphics commands utilizing the hardware graphics pipeline. At least one of the graphics commands is then conditionally skipping based on the condition data in response to another graphics command utilizing the hardware graphics pipeline.

System and method for display list occlusion branching

A graphics processor performed gamma correction of the coverage values of pixels. In one embodiment, a gamma correction factor is written into a run-time loadable lookup table of the graphics processor. The gamma corrected coverage values may be used in an anti-aliasing process to form smoothed primitives.

Apparatus, system, and method for gamma correction of smoothed primitives

A system, method and computer program product are provided for accelerating graphics processing utilizing a graphics application program interface. Initially, graphics data is processed in a graphics system with components including a central processing unit, a geometry processing module, and a pixel processing module. In use, the graphics application program interface accepts one or more first occlusion queries followed by a second occlusion query. The second occlusion query is at least partially processed by the graphics system before a final result of any one of the first occlusion queries is computed by the graphics system.

Growing community of inventors

Santa Clara, CA, United States of America

Matthew J Craighead