ALLOCATION OF PRIMITIVES TO PRIMITIVE BLOCKS

摘要

An application sends primitives to a graphics processing system so that an image of a 3D scene can be rendered. The primitives are placed into primitive blocks for storage and retrieval from a parameter memory. Rather than simply placing the first primitives into a primitive block until the primitive block is full and then placing further primitives into the next primitive block, multiple primitive blocks can be “open” such that a primitive block allocation module can allocate primitives to one of the open primitive blocks to thereby sort the primitives into primitive blocks according to their spatial positions. By grouping primitives together into primitive blocks in accordance with their spatial positions, the performance of a rasterization module can be improved. For example, in a tile-based rendering system this may mean that fewer primitive blocks need to be fetched by a hidden surface removal module in order to process a tile.

主权项

1. A method of allocating primitives to primitive blocks at a primitive block allocation module of a computer graphics processing system, which includes a data store for storing a set of primitive blocks to which primitives can be allocated, the method comprising:
receiving a sequence of primitives; and for each of the received primitives, if at least one primitive block is stored in the data store:
(i) comparing an indication of a spatial position of the received primitive with at least one indication of a spatial position of the at least one primitive block stored in the data store; and(ii) allocating the received primitive to a primitive block based on the result of the comparison, such that the received primitive is allocated to a primitive block in accordance with its spatial position.