Automatic memory management for zone rendering
AssigneeIntel Corporation
InventorsPeter L. Doyle, Aditya Sreenivas
Life of this patent
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Abstract
The present invention optimizes graphics performance during zone rendering by providing an automatic management of bin memory between the binning and rendering phases. Embodiments of the present invention provide a mechanism by which the binner and renderer automatically share a pool of physical memory pages in order to build bin buffers and recycle them after they have been used in rendering. This is performed in such a fashion that multiple binned scenes can be queued up concurrently, with no requirement for software intervention except under exceptional conditions. The need for software management of zone rendering bin buffer memory is thus eliminated. Multiple scenes for binning and rendering can also be queued without software intervention.
Claims21
An apparatus for rendering a scene including geographical primitives, comprising:
- a binning engine;
- a rendering engine;
- and
- an automatic memory manager to manage memory pages between the binning and rendering engines comprising:
- a memory area to store memory pages;
- and
- a plurality of memory area registers including a first register and a second register, wherein the first register contains information to point to memory locations in the memory area where the binning engine can retrieve memory pages to build buffers initiated with a buffer instruction including reclaim command, and wherein the second register contains information to point to memory locations in the memory area where the rendering engine can automatically return memory pages in response to the reclaim command associated with the rendered buffer.
Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.