Demand-based memory system for graphics applications
AssigneeNVIDIA U.S. Investment Company
InventorsOren Rubinstein, Ming Benjamin Zhu
Life of this patent
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Abstract
A memory system and methods of operating the same that drastically increase the efficiency in memory use and allocation in graphics systems. In a graphics system using a tiled architecture, instead of pre-allocating a fixed amount of memory for each tile, the invention dynamically allocates varying amounts of memory per tile depending on the demand. In one embodiment all or a portion of the available memory is divided into smaller pages that are preferably equal in size. Memory allocation is done by page based on the amount of memory required for a given tile.
Claims17
A computer graphics system comprising:
- a memory divided into a plurality of pages and configured to store graphics data;
- a tile management unit coupled to the memory and configured to maintain a plurality of tile descriptors corresponding to a plurality of screen tiles,
- a memory management unit coupled to the memory and configured to allocate one or more pages of memory to store data associated with a given screen tile;
- a scan/z engine coupled to the memory management unit;
- a rasterizer coupled to the memory management unit;
- and
- a shader coupled to the rasterizer.
Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.