Interrupt handling techniques in the rasterizer of a GPU
AssigneeNVIDIA Corporation
InventorsFranklin C. Crow, Jeffrey R. Sewall
Life of this patent
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Abstract
Techniques for handling an interrupt in the rasterizer, in accordance with embodiment of the present technology, start with rasterizing one or more primitives of a first context. If an interrupt is received, state information of the rasterizer is saved in a backing store after coarse rasterizing a given tile. After storing the raster state information, the one or more primitives of a second context are rasterized. After the second context is served, the raster state information of the first context is restored and rasterization of the one or more primitives of the first context is restarted.
Claims18
A method of handling an interrupt in a rasterizer comprising:
- starting rasterization of a current primitive of a first process;
- determining if an interrupt is received during coarse rasterization of the current primitive;
- continuing rasterization of the current primitive until it is completed, if the interrupt is not received;
- saving the state of the rasterization of the current primitive of the first process, if the interrupt is received;
- servicing a second process corresponding to the interrupt, after the state of the rasterization of the current primitive of the first process is saved;
- restoring the saved state of the rasterization of the current primitive of the first process, after the second process is serviced;
- and
- continuing rasterization of the current primitive of the first process until rasterization is completed, after the state of the rasterization is restored.
One or more computing device readable media containing a plurality of instructions which when executed cause a computing device to implement a method comprising:
- rasterizing one or more primitives of a first context;
- storing raster state information at the end of coarse rasterizing a current tile of a current primitive if an interrupt is received;
- rasterizing one or more primitives of a second context in response to the received interrupt after storing the raster state information;
- reloading the raster state information after the second context is served;
- and
- restarting the rasterizing of the one or more primitives of the first context after reloading the raster state information.
A graphics processing unit comprising:
- a rasterizer for determining which pixels of a display screen are touched by a primitive, wherein the rasterizer includes;
- a coarse rasterizer for determining a set of tiles that touch a current primitive;
- an interrupt handler for receiving an interrupt, saving a state of the rasterizer after coarse rasterizing a given tile in response to receiving the interrupt, and restoring the state of the rasterizer after serving another context in response to receiving the interrupt;
- and
- a backing store for storing the state of the rasterizer.
Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.