Beam scanning image processing within an improved graphics processor microarchitecture

A computing system comprising:

• a data interface including one or more of a network controller, a memory controller or a bus, the data interface to obtain an output image comprising a plurality of pixel values stored within an image buffer memory and one or more graphical objects to be rendered within an output image associated with a three dimensional (3D) scene;
• an output image scanner to retrieve the contents of the image buffer memory and out pixel values to a display device based on graphical objects;
• and
• a beam scanning rasterizer including:
• a rasterizer to generate the output image containing the graphical objects;
• a image block retriever coupled to the image buffer memory and the rasterizer, the image block retriever to retrieve a row of pixel data from a row of image pixel tiles having one or more rows of pixel data, for use by the rasterizer;
• and
• an image block processing scheduler to schedule the start of processing of the image pixel data retrieved by the image block retriever by the rasterizer, the image block processing scheduler:
• determines a start time for the output image scanner to begin scanning the output image to the display device,
• determines the processing start time for each row of tiles of image pixel data within the rasterizer to ensure a completion of the rasterizer before the row of tiles of image pixel data within the output image begin to be scanned out, and
• schedules a start of processing of rows of tiles of image pixel data.