SYSTEM, APPARATUS AND METHOD FOR SPATIALLY SORTING IMAGE DATA IN A THREE-DIMENSIONAL GRAPHICS PIPELINE

摘要

The present invention is a mid-pipeline sorting unit that sorts image data mid-pipeline in a tiled 3-D graphics pipeline architecture. The image data includes vertices of geometric primitives. The mid-pipeline sorting determines whether a geometric primitive intersects a region of a 2-D window. The 2-D window having been divided into multiple such regions. Upon determining which region of the 2-D window that the geometric primitive intersects, the mid-pipeline sorting unit stores the vertices that define the geometric primitive into a memory in a manner that associates each of the geometric primitive's vertices with the region that was intersected. After the image data is sorted into the memory, the mid pipeline sorting unit sends the sorted image data to the subsequent stage on a region by region basis. Yet another embodiment of the present invention provides a guaranteed conservative memory estimate to the mid-pipeline sorting stage of whether there is enough free memory for the mid pipeline sorting unit to sort and store the image data. Yet another embodiment of the present invention sends image data from a memory to a next stage in a graphics pipeline in a spatially staggered sequence.