System, method and article of manufacture for a programmable processing model with instruction set
AssigneeNVIDIA Corporation
InventorsJohn Erik Lindholm, David B. Kirk, Henry P. Moreton, Simon Moy
Life of this patent
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Abstract
A system, method and article of manufacture are provided for programmable processing in a computer graphics pipeline. Initially, data is received from a source buffer. Thereafter, programmable operations are performed on the data in order to generate output. The operations are programmable in that a user may utilize instructions from a predetermined instruction set for generating the same. Such output is stored in a register. During operation, the output stored in the register is used in performing the programmable operations on the data.
Claims12
A method for programmable processing in a computer graphics pipeline, comprising:
- receiving graphics data;
- and
- performing programmable operations on the graphics data in order to generate output, wherein the operations are generated by a user utilizing instructions from a predetermined instruction set, the instructions including a reciprocal instruction, a reciprocal square root instruction, a three component dot product instruction, a four component dot product instruction, a distance instruction, a minimum instruction, a maximum instruction, an exponential instruction, and a logarithm instruction;
- wherein the operations include a swizzle operation, a write mask operation, and a negating operation;
- wherein the instructions are each carried out using a unique associated method and data structure, and each data structure associated with each instruction includes both a source location identifier indicating a source location of the graphics data, and a source component identifier indicating in which component of a plurality of components of the source location the graphics data resides.
A method, comprising:
- storing a plurality of instructions in memory for processing graphics data, the instructions corresponding to a plurality of operations including a swizzle operation, a write mask operation, and a negating operation;
- programmably processing the graphics data by the operations by calling the instructions in a program;
- wherein the instructions include a reciprocal instruction, a reciprocal square root instruction, a three component dot product instruction, a four component dot product instruction, a distance instruction, a minimum instruction, a maximum instruction, an exponential instruction, and a logarithm instruction;
- wherein the instructions are each carried out using a unique associated method and data structure, and each data structure associated with each instruction includes both a source location identifier indicating a source location of the graphics data, and a source component identifier indicating in which component of a plurality of components of the source location the graphics data resides.
Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.