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:
Oct. 28, 2014
Filed:
Dec. 20, 2012
Applicant:
Nvidia Corporation, Santa Clara, CA (US);
Inventor:
G. Evan Hart, Bristow, VA (US);
Assignee:
Nvidia, Santa Clara, CA (US);
Attorney:
Primary Examiner:
Int. Cl.
CPC ...
G06T 15/60 (2006.01);
U.S. Cl.
CPC ...
G06T 15/60 (2013.01);
Abstract
A shadow softening GPU and method. One embodiment of the GPU is configured to render a shadow cast by a surface occluding a light source and includes: (1) a fetching circuit operable to retrieve a depth value from a texture associated with the surface and a depth comparison result in a single fetch operation, and (2) a shadow softening circuit configured to respectively employ the depth comparison result and the depth value to identify the surface as a blocker and attenuate the light source for a pixel.