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:
Mar. 27, 2012
Filed:
Jan. 11, 2011
John M. Airey, Mountain View, CA (US);
Mark S. Peercy, Cupertino, CA (US);
Robert A. Drebin, Palo Alto, CA (US);
John Montrym, Los Altos Hills, CA (US);
David L. Dignam, Belmont, CA (US);
Christopher J. Migdal, Cupertino, CA (US);
Danny D. Loh, Menlo Park, CA (US);
John M. Airey, Mountain View, CA (US);
Mark S. Peercy, Cupertino, CA (US);
Robert A. Drebin, Palo Alto, CA (US);
John Montrym, Los Altos Hills, CA (US);
David L. Dignam, Belmont, CA (US);
Christopher J. Migdal, Cupertino, CA (US);
Danny D. Loh, Menlo Park, CA (US);
Graphics Properties Holdings, Inc., New Rochelle, NY (US);
Abstract
A floating point rasterization and frame buffer in a computer system graphics program. The rasterization, fog, lighting, texturing, blending, and antialiasing processes operate on floating point values. In one embodiment, a 16-bit floating point format consisting of one sign bit, ten mantissa bits, and five exponent bits (s10e5), is used to optimize the range and precision afforded by the 16 available bits of information. In other embodiments, the floating point format can be defined in the manner preferred in order to achieve a desired range and precision of the data stored in the frame buffer. The final floating point values corresponding to pixel attributes are stored in a frame buffer and eventually read and drawn for display. The graphics program can operate directly on the data in the frame buffer without losing any of the desired range and precision of the data.