TWO-DIMENSIONAL MEMORY-MANAGER OF QUADRANT BASE

摘要

PURPOSE: To provide a computer graphics system in which contents of a graphical storage area of variable size are stored simultaneously in a graphics memory addressed in two-dimension. CONSTITUTION: A storage area stores data corresponding to a 2-dimensional graphical image such as a texture map, a MIP map or a font. The graphic system uses a quad tree denoting a current memory state to manage a storage area in the graphic memory. A memory manager uses the quad tree so as to divide a memory address space into a plurality of 1st level quadrants with an equal 2-dimensional size. The size of the storage area to be set in the memory is compared with the size of the 1st level quadrants. When they are equal to each other, the storage area is located to any of the quadrants. When they are not equal, the memory manager divides finner the memory into lower level quadrants required to stored the storage area.