GRAPHICS PROCESSING SYSTEMS

摘要

A tile-based graphics processing pipeline includes a back-facing determination and culling unit that is operable to cull back-facing triangles before the tiling stage. The back-facing determination and culling unit include a triangle size estimator that estimates the size of a triangle being considered. If the size of the triangle is less than a selected size, then the area of the triangle is calculated using fixed point arithmetic and the result of that area calculation is used by a back-face culling unit to determine whether to cull the triangle or not. On the other hand, if the size estimator determines that the primitive is greater than the selected size, then the triangle bypasses the fixed point area calculation and back-face culling unit and is instead passed directly to the tiler.

主权项

1. A method of processing a graphics primitive in a graphics processing pipeline, the method comprising:
determining whether a property of the primitive meets a particular condition; and when the property of the primitive meets the particular condition: determining the facing direction of the primitive using a particular processing operation; and using the determined facing direction of the primitive to determine whether to cull the primitive from further processing; and when it is determined using the facing direction to cull the primitive from further processing, culling the primitive from further processing.