Display system having floating point rasterization and floating point framebuffering
DCFirst Claim
1. A computer system, comprising:
- a processor for performing geometric calculations on a plurality of vertices of a primitive;
a rasterization circuit coupled to the processor that rasterizes the primitive according to a scan conversion process which operates using a floating point format; and
a frame buffer coupled to the rasterization circuit for storing a plurality of color values in the floating point format.
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Accused Products
Abstract
A floating point rasterization and frame buffer in a computer system graphics program. The rasterization, fog, lighting, texturing, blending, and antialiasing processes operate on floating point values. In one embodiment, a 16-bit floating point format consisting of one sign bit, ten mantissa bits, and five exponent bits (s10e5), is used to optimize the range and precision afforded by the 16 available bits of information. In other embodiments, the floating point format can be defined in the manner preferred in order to achieve a desired range and precision of the data stored in the frame buffer. The final floating point values corresponding to pixel attributes are stored in a frame buffer and eventually read and drawn for display. The graphics program can operate directly on the data in the frame buffer without losing any of the desired range and precision of the data.
53 Citations
39 Claims
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1. A computer system, comprising:
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a processor for performing geometric calculations on a plurality of vertices of a primitive; a rasterization circuit coupled to the processor that rasterizes the primitive according to a scan conversion process which operates using a floating point format; and a frame buffer coupled to the rasterization circuit for storing a plurality of color values in the floating point format. - View Dependent Claims (2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13)
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14. In a computer system, a method for operating on data stored in a frame buffer, comprised of:
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a) scan converting the data in a floating point format to produce floating point scan converted data; b) storing the floating point scan converted data in the frame buffer in the floating point format; c) reading the floating point scan converted data from the frame buffer; d) operating directly on the floating point scan converted data in the floating point format to produce color data in the floating point format; and e) writing the floating point color data to the frame buffer in the floating point format. - View Dependent Claims (15, 16, 17, 18, 19)
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20. A computer system comprising:
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a raster subsystem for performing a rasterization process, the rasterization process performed in a floating point format; and a floating point frame buffer coupled to the raster subsystem for storing a plurality of floating point color values, wherein the floating point color values are read out from the frame buffer in the floating point format for display. - View Dependent Claims (21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26)
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27. A rendering pipeline, comprising:
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a processor for performing geometric calculations on a plurality of vertices of a primitive; a rasterization module coupled to the processor that rasterizes the primitive according to a scan conversion process which operates using a floating point format; and a frame buffer coupled to the rasterization module for storing a plurality of color values in the floating point format. - View Dependent Claims (28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39)
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Specification