Leveraging control surface fast clears to optimize 3d operations
AssigneeIntel Corporation
InventorsDevan Burke, Abhishek Venkatesh, Travis Schluessler
Life of this patent
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Abstract
One embodiment provides a graphics processor comprising a hardware graphics rendering pipeline configured to perform multisample anti-aliasing, the hardware graphics rendering pipeline including pixel processing logic to determine that each sample location of a pixel of a multisample surface is associated with a clear value and resolve a color value for the pixel to a non-multisample surface via a write of metadata to indicate that the pixel has the clear value.
Claims20
A graphics processor comprising:
- a hardware graphics rendering pipeline configured to perform multisample anti-aliasing, the hardware graphics rendering pipeline including pixel processing logic to:
- determine that each sample location of a pixel of a multisample surface is associated with a clear value;
- and
- resolve a color value for the pixel to a non-multisample surface via a write of metadata to indicate that the pixel has the clear value.
A method of resolving color data from a multisample render target, the method comprising:
- dispatching a multisample resolve call to a shader unit, the shader unit to execute a pixel shader program to generate a resolved color value from multiple sample locations of a multisample surface;
- determining, via the shader unit, that a first pixel of the multisample render target contains is a cleared pixel;
- and
- writing, via the shader unit, metadata to indicate that the resolved color value for the first pixel is the color value of a cleared pixel.
A data processing system comprising:
- a non-transitory machine-readable medium to store instructions for execution by one or more processors of the data processing system, the instructions including instructions associated with a pixel shader program;
- a memory module to store a multisample render target;
- and
- a graphics processing unit having a hardware graphics rendering pipeline configured to perform multisample anti-aliasing, the hardware graphics rendering pipeline including pixel processing logic to execute the pixel shader program, the pixel shader program to cause the processing logic to:
- determine that each sample location of a pixel of a multisample surface is associated with a clear value;
- and
- resolve a color value for the pixel to a non-multisample surface via a write of metadata to indicate that the pixel has the clear value.
Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.