Processing of primitive blocks in parallel tiling engine pipes

摘要

A tiling unit is arranged to process a sequence of primitive blocks using multiple parallel tiling engine pipes. Each tiling engine pipe processes a respective primitive block, and determines priorities for regions of the respective primitive block based on whether the primitive block overlaps with any of the other primitive blocks currently being processed in the parallel tiling engine pipes. Each tiling engine pipe processes the regions of its primitive block in a tile-order based on the priorities of the regions. The submission order of the primitives should be maintained when primitive identifiers are written into display lists. Therefore, the priority of a region of a first primitive block is increased (or decreased) if it overlaps with another primitive block which has a higher (or lower) sequence number and which is currently being processed in another tiling engine pipe. This reduces the time that the tiling engine pipes are idle.

主权项

1. A method of processing in a plurality of tiling engine pipes within a graphics processing system configured to use a rendering space which is subdivided into a plurality of tiles, a sequence of primitive blocks each including at least one primitive, wherein the tiling engine pipes are arranged to process respective primitive blocks in parallel, and wherein a location of each of the primitive blocks within the rendering space is indicated by a respective location indicator, and a position of each of the primitive blocks within the sequence of primitive blocks is indicated by a respective sequence indicator, the method comprising, for each of a plurality of the respective primitive blocks:
determining a priority for each of a plurality of regions of the respective primitive block, each of the regions comprising one or more tiles, wherein if location indicators of primitive blocks currently being processed in the parallel tiling engine pipes indicate that there are overlapping primitive blocks within a particular region of the respective primitive block then the priority for the particular region is determined based on the sequence indicators of the overlapping primitive blocks currently being processed in the parallel tiling engine pipes; and processing primitives of the respective primitive block for tiles of the regions of the respective primitive block in a tile-order based on the determined priorities for the regions, to thereby determine for each of the tiles of the regions of the respective primitive block, which, if any, of the primitives of the respective primitive block are present within the tile.