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:
Jul. 18, 2017
Filed:
Dec. 27, 2012
Nvidia Corporation, Santa Clara, CA (US);
Gregory Scott Palmer, Cedar Park, TX (US);
Ziyad S. Hakura, Gilroy, CA (US);
Emmett M. Kilgariff, San Jose, CA (US);
Dale L. Kirkland, Madison, AL (US);
Lacky V. Shah, Los Altos, Hills, CA (US);
NVIDIA Corporation, Santa Clara, CA (US);
Abstract
One embodiment of the present invention sets forth a technique for mid-primitive execution preemption. When preemption is initiated no new instructions are issued, in-flight instructions progress to an execution unit boundary, and the execution state is unloaded from the processing pipeline. The execution units within the processing pipeline, including the coarse rasterization unit complete execution of in-flight instructions and become idle. However, rasterization of a triangle may be preempted at a coarse raster region boundary. The amount of context state to be stored is reduced because the execution units are idle. Preempting at the mid-primitive level during rasterization reduces the time from when preemption is initiated to when another process can execute because the entire triangle is not rasterized.