Configurable buffer for multipass applications

摘要

A configurable buffer has two storage areas. Depending upon a state of a buffer control signal, the two storage areas are configured to buffer a single stream of data together or to buffer two streams of data separately. In an exemplary video graphics processing application, one stream of data includes pass-through values of fragments being rendered (e.g. color, location, and/or depth values) and the other stream of data includes corresponding displaced (or otherwise perturbed) texture coordinate pairs. Such a buffer may be used to reduce the amount of buffer storage needed to support both single-pass and multipass operations in a pixel pipeline.