Intel Corporation

Paul A Johnson

Subramaniam M Maiyuran

Tomas G Akenine-Moller

Linda L Hurd

Jon N Hasselgren

Thomas A Piazza

Peter L Doyle

Carl Jacob Munkberg

Robert L Farrell

Saurabh Sharma

Bimal Poddar

Kalyan Kumar Bhiravabhatla

Harri Syrja

Kevin Rogovin

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

Technologies are presented that optimize graphics processing performance. A method of frequency scaling may include beginning a graphics workload with a starting geometry preprocessing frequency of a multiple of a streaming shader engine frequency where the multiple is non-zero; determining a primitive start pitch for a primitive of the graphics workload; comparing the determined primitive start pitch to a predetermined threshold and, if it exceeds the predetermined threshold: reducing the geometry preprocessing frequency, and, at the start of the next primitive, setting the geometry preprocessing frequency back to the starting geometry preprocessing frequency; and repeating the determining and comparing for each remaining primitive until an end of the graphics workload. Performance gain based on primitive start pitch information may also be determined.

Dynamic graphics geometry preprocessing frequency scaling and prediction of performance gain

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Folsom, CA, United States of America

Paul A Johnson