Mid-primitive graphics execution preemption

One embodiment of the present invention sets forth a technique for mid-primitive execution preemption. When preemption is initiated no new instructions are issued, in-flight instructions progress to an execution unit boundary, and the execution state is unloaded from the processing pipeline. The exe...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors Shah Lacky V, Hakura Ziyad S, Palmer Gregory Scott, Kirkland Dale L, Kilgariff Emmett M
Format Patent
LanguageEnglish
Published 18.07.2017
Subjects
CALCULATING
COMPUTING
COUNTING
IMAGE DATA PROCESSING OR GENERATION, IN GENERAL
PHYSICS
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Summary:One embodiment of the present invention sets forth a technique for mid-primitive execution preemption. When preemption is initiated no new instructions are issued, in-flight instructions progress to an execution unit boundary, and the execution state is unloaded from the processing pipeline. The execution units within the processing pipeline, including the coarse rasterization unit complete execution of in-flight instructions and become idle. However, rasterization of a triangle may be preempted at a coarse raster region boundary. The amount of context state to be stored is reduced because the execution units are idle. Preempting at the mid-primitive level during rasterization reduces the time from when preemption is initiated to when another process can execute because the entire triangle is not rasterized.
Bibliography:Application Number: US201213728881