METHODS OF AND APPARATUS FOR ASSIGNING VERTEX AND FRAGMENT SHADING OPERATIONS TO A MULTI-THREADED MULTI-FORMAT BLENDING DEVICE

摘要

An exemplary aspect relates generally to graphics processing systems and more specifically relates to executing vertex and fragment shading operations to a pixel blender device. The technology is at least applicable to graphics processing systems in which vertex and fragment shading operations are executed by dedicated fragment and vertex units or by unified shading units. The graphics processing unit driver is responsible to determine if a shading operation can be assigned to a multi-threaded, multi-format pixel blender. Based on the determination, the fragment shading operations or the vertex shading operations or both are assigned to the pixel blender for execution; the execution of the fragment and/or vertex shading operations by the shader unit(s) is skipped. The determination is based on a code analysis. Forwarding shading operations from the fragment and vertex shaders, i.e., bypassing the shading units, to a programmable, multi-threaded and multi-format pixel blender may save electrical power consumption because a programmable, multi-threaded, and multi-format pixel blender is a less complex circuit compared to a fragment or a vertex or a unified shading unit.

主权项

1. A device for parallel multithreaded blending in graphics systems comprising:
means to receive a plurality of color components and alpha information from multiple source and multiple destination image fragment streams; means to receive configuration information prior to executing a batch of graphics operations; a blender processing unit capable of combing in parallel the color and alpha channels from a plurality of pixels in the source and destination images in order to produce a plurality of fragment pixels of a target image; the blender processing unit capable of executing at least two parallel threads of operation, wherein said blender processing unit multiplexes in time a plurality of blending functions and memory operations on different fragments; the blender processing unit supporting concurrent multithreaded processing of the plurality of fragments with different blending functions applied to each fragment; the blender processing unit capable of executing programmable concurrent multithreaded vertex shading on vertex primitives using the said configuration information; the blender processing unit capable of executing programmable concurrent multithreaded fragment shading on fragment primitives using the said configuration information; the blender processing unit processes each of the multiple concurrent threads in a round robin fashion; and the blender processing unit comprising multiple register files, multiple execution units, and multiple instruction pointers wherein each parallel thread is associated with a specific and predetermined instruction memory and instruction pointer; and the blender processing unit comprising multiple instruction memories, wherein each instruction memory is associated with one thread and each instruction memory contains instruction code formatted as a very long instruction word and includes multiple op-codes, multiple destination descriptors, and multiple source descriptors.