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:
Apr. 06, 2004
Filed:
Dec. 17, 1999
Howard H. Cheng, Redmond, WA (US);
Robert Moore, Redmond, WA (US);
Farhad Fouladi, Palo Alto, CA (US);
Timothy J. Van Hook, Atherton, CA (US);
Nintendo Co., Ltd., Kyoto, JP;
Abstract
In a 3D interactive computer graphics system such as a video game display system, polygon vertex data is fed to a 3D graphics processor/display engine via a vertex cache used to cache and organize indexed primitive vertex data streams. The vertex cache may be a small, low-latency cache memory local to the display engine hardware. Polygons can be represented as indexed arrays, e.g., indexed linear lists of data components representing some feature of a vertex (for example, positions, colors, surface normals, or texture coordinates). The vertex cache can fetch the relevant blocks of indexed vertex attribute data on an as-needed basis to make it available to the display processor—providing spatial locality for display processing without requiring the vertex data to be prestored in display order. Efficiency can be increased by customizing and optimizing the vertex cache and associated tags for the purpose of delivering vertices to the graphics engine—allowing more efficient prefetching and assembling of vertices than might be possible using a general-purpose cache and tag structure.