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:
Feb. 25, 2025
Filed:
Dec. 27, 2021
Advanced Micro Devices, Inc., Santa Clara, CA (US);
Ati Technologies Ulc, Markham, CA;
Christopher J. Brennan, Boxborough, MA (US);
Randy Wayne Ramsey, Orlando, FL (US);
Nishank Pathak, Orlando, FL (US);
Ricky Wai Yeung Iu, Markham, CA;
Jimshed Mirza, Markham, CA;
Anthony Chan, Markham, CA;
Advanced Micro Devices, Inc., Santa Clara, CA (US);
ATI Technologies ULC, Markham, CA;
Abstract
Systems, apparatuses, and methods for implementing a discard engine in a graphics pipeline are disclosed. A system includes a graphics pipeline with a geometry engine launching shaders that generate attribute data for vertices of each primitive of a set of primitives. The attribute data is consumed by pixel shaders, with each pixel shader generating a deallocation message when the pixel shader no longer needs the attribute data. A discard engine gathers deallocations from multiple pixel shaders and determines when the attribute data is no longer needed. Once a block of attributes has been consumed by all potential pixel shader consumers, the discard engine deallocates the given block of attributes. The discard engine sends a discard command to the caches so that the attribute data can be invalidated and not written back to memory.