Controlling rendering operations by shader buffer identification

Abstract

Methods of rendering a scene in a graphics system identify a draw call within a current render and analyse the last shader in the series of shaders used by the draw call to identify any buffers that are sampled by the last shader and that are to be written by a previous render that has not yet been sent for execution on the GPU. If any such buffers are identified, further analysis is performed to determine whether the last shader samples from the identified buffers using screen space coordinates that correspond to a current fragment location and if this determination is positive, the draw call is added to data relating to the previous render and the last shader is recompiled to replace an instruction that reads data from an identified buffer with an instruction that reads data from an on-chip register.