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:
Jun. 24, 2014
Filed:
May. 04, 2010
Emmett M. Kilgariff, San Jose, CA (US);
Steven E. Molnar, Chapel Hill, NC (US);
Sean J. Treichler, Sunnyvale, CA (US);
Johnny S. Rhoades, Durham, NC (US);
Gernot Schaufler, Mountain View, CA (US);
Dale L. Kirkland, Madison, AL (US);
Cynthia Ann Edgeworth Allison, Madison, AL (US);
Karl M. Wurstner, Madison, AL (US);
Timothy John Purcell, Provo, UT (US);
Emmett M. Kilgariff, San Jose, CA (US);
Steven E. Molnar, Chapel Hill, NC (US);
Sean J. Treichler, Sunnyvale, CA (US);
Johnny S. Rhoades, Durham, NC (US);
Gernot Schaufler, Mountain View, CA (US);
Dale L. Kirkland, Madison, AL (US);
Cynthia Ann Edgeworth Allison, Madison, AL (US);
Karl M. Wurstner, Madison, AL (US);
Timothy John Purcell, Provo, UT (US);
NVIDIA Corporation, Santa Clara, CA (US);
Abstract
One embodiment of the present invention sets forth a technique for using a shared memory to store hardware-managed virtual buffers. A circular buffer is allocated within a general-purpose multi-use cache for storage of primitive attribute data rather than having a dedicated buffer for the storage of the primitive attribute data. The general-purpose multi-use cache is also configured to store other graphics data sinces the space requirement for primitive attribute data storage is highly variable, depending on the number of attributes and the size of primitives. Entries in the circular buffer are allocated as needed and released and invalidated after the primitive attribute data has been consumed. An address to the circular buffer entry is transmitted along with primitive descriptors from object-space processing to the distributed processing in screen-space.