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:
Dec. 30, 2014
Filed:
Oct. 06, 2010
Jerome F. Duluk, Jr., Palo Alto, CA (US);
Jesse David Hall, Santa Clara, CA (US);
Patrick R. Brown, Wake Forest, NC (US);
Mark Dennis Stadler, Los Altos, CA (US);
Jerome F. Duluk, Jr., Palo Alto, CA (US);
Jesse David Hall, Santa Clara, CA (US);
Patrick R. Brown, Wake Forest, NC (US);
Mark Dennis Stadler, Los Altos, CA (US);
NVIDIA Corporation, Santa Clara, CA (US);
Abstract
One embodiment of the present invention sets forth a technique for storing only the enabled components for each enabled vector and writing only enabled components to one or more specified render targets. A shader program header (SPH) file provides per-component mask bits for each render target. Each enabled mask bit indicates that the pixel shader generates the corresponding component as an output to the raster operations unit. In the hardware, the per-component mask bits are combined with the applications programming interface (API)-level per-component write masks to determine the components that are updated by the shader program. The combined mask is used as the write enable bits for components in one or more render targets. One advantage of the combined mask is that the components that are not updated are not forwarded from the pixel shader to the ROP, thereby saving bandwidth between those processing units.