The patent badge is an abbreviated version of the USPTO patent document. The patent badge does contain a link to the full patent document.
The patent badge is an abbreviated version of the USPTO patent document. The patent badge covers the following: Patent number, Date patent was issued, Date patent was filed, Title of the patent, Applicant, Inventor, Assignee, Attorney firm, Primary examiner, Assistant examiner, CPCs, and Abstract. The patent badge does contain a link to the full patent document (in Adobe Acrobat format, aka pdf). To download or print any patent click here.
Patent No.:
Date of Patent:
Jan. 28, 2020
Filed:
Oct. 30, 2018
Microsoft Technology Licensing, Llc, Redmond, WA (US);
Mark S. Grossman, Palo Alto, CA (US);
Jason Matthew Gould, Woodinville, WA (US);
Alexander Nankervis, Seattle, WA (US);
Charles Neill Boyd, Woodinville, WA (US);
Microsoft Technology Licensing, LLC, Redmond, WA (US);
Abstract
Methods and devices for rendering graphics in a computer system include a graphical processing unit (GPU) with a flexible, dynamic, application-directed mechanism for varying the rate at which fragment shading is performed for rendering an image to a display. In particular, the described aspects allow different shading rates to be used for different regions of a primitive based on a new, interpolated shading rate parameter. In other words, the described aspects enable the GPU to change shading rates on-the-fly between different fragments of each primitive. Additionally, or independently, the GPU utilizes each respective shading rate parameter to determine how many sample positions to consider to be covered by the computed shaded output, e.g., the fragment color, thereby allowing the color sample to be shared across two or more pixels.