US 2014/0192075 A1 · Adaptive Lossy Framebuffer Compression with Controllable Error Rate

Abstract

The device and method described in this application relate generally to graphics processing systems utilizing the tile based rendering technique and more specifically relate to the processing of the framebuffer data in graphics processing applications. The present invention discloses techniques to reduce the bandwidth needed to access the color data stored in the framebuffer. A method for adaptive lossy delta based compression of color data is disclosed. The error rate, that is the amount of color data lost during the lossy compression process, is controlled by various parameters of the rendered tiles produced by the graphics processing system. The compression process is driven by a dedicated unit which enables informed compression decisions with controllable error rate so as the output color data can be reliably decompressed to produce the original color data with minimal or no errors.

Claims20

Dependent claims

A device for color framebuffer tiled storage and control comprising of:

means to receive fragments streams from a rendering graphics processing logic;
a color blending unit;
memory to hold a plurality of image fragments of at least two tiles;
a sampling unit with means to calculate and store color deltas;
a framebuffer update unit with integrated update history unit and comparison unit;
a delta compression and decompression unit with color reduction logic;
means to read and write tile metadata from external memory storage;
means to transfer stored fragments to external memory storage.

5 more elements

Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.

Adaptive Lossy Framebuffer Compression with Controllable Error Rate

Life of this patent

Adaptive Lossy Framebuffer Compression with Controllable Error Rate

Life of this patent

Abstract

Claims20