Position-only shading pipeline
US9824412B2 · kind B2 · utility
Assignee
Inventors
Key dates
| Filing date | Sep 24, 2014 |
| Grant date | Nov 21, 2017 |
| Priority date | — |
| Expiry date | May 12, 2035 |
Classification
- Technology area (CPC G)Physics
- CPC primaryG09G5/393
- WIPO fieldComputer technology
- WIPO sectorElectrical engineering
Abstract
In position-only shading, two geometry pipes exist, a trimmed down version called the Cull Pipe and a full version called the Replay Pipe. Thus, the Cull Pipe executes the position shaders in parallel with the main application, but typically generates the critical results much faster as it fetches and shades only the position attribute of the vertices and avoids the rasterization as well as the rendering of pixels for the frame buffer. Furthermore, the Cull Pipe uses these critical results to compute visibility information for all the triangles whether they are culled or not. On the other hand, the Replay Pipe consumes the visibility information to skip the culled triangles and shades only the visible triangles that are finally passed to the rasterization phase. Together the two pipes can hide the long cull runs of discarded triangles and can complete the work faster in some embodiments.
Source: USPTO / EPO open patent data. Objective bibliographic and citation counts.