GENERATION AND STORAGE OF COMPRESSED Z-PLANES IN GRAPHICS PROCESSING

Abstract: generation and storage of compressed z-planes in graphics processing is described. an example of a processor includes a rasterizer to generate a fragment of pixel data including blocks of pixel data; a depth pipeline to receive the fragment, the pipeline including a first and second depth test hardware, the first depth test hardware to perform a coarse depth test including determining minimum and maximum depths for each block; and a depth buffer, wherein the processor is to determine whether the fragment meets requirements that the fragment fully covers a tile of pixel data and passes a first depth test, and that each of the minimum and maximum depths of the fragment has a same sign and exponent, and, upon determining that the fragment meets the requirements, to generate a compressed depth plane utilizing the first depth test and update the depth buffer with the compressed depth plane.

Inventor(s): Saikat Mandal, Karol Szerszen, Vasanth Ranganathan, Altug Koker, Michael Norris, Prasoonkumar Surti, Takahiro Murata

CPC Classification: G06T1/20 (Processor architectures; Processor configuration, e.g. pipelining)

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