Mechanism for effectively handling texture sampling

Patent metadata

Field	Value
Publication number	US-8933946-B2
Application number	US-96740807-A
Country	US
Kind code	B2
Filing date	Dec 31, 2007
Priority date	Dec 31, 2007
Publication date	Jan 13, 2015
Grant date	Jan 13, 2015

Abstract

A method and apparatus for efficiently handling texture sampling is described herein. A compiler or other software is capable of breaking a texture sampling operation for a pixel into a pre-fetch operation and a use operation. A processing element, in response to executing the pre-fetch operation, delegates computation of the texture sample of the pixel to a hardware texture sample unit. In parallel to the hardware texture sample unit performing a texture sample for the pixel and providing the result, i.e. a textured pixel (texel), to a destination address, the processing element is capable of executing other independent code. After an amount of time, the processing element executes the use operation, such as a load operation to load the texel from the destination address.

First claim

What is claimed is:

1. A non-transitory machine readable medium including compiler code, which when executed, is to cause a machine to perform the operations of:
compiling application code to transform the application code into compiled application code, wherein during the compiling the application code,
detecting a texture sample operation for a pixel in the application code;
breaking the texture sample operation in the application code into a pre-fetch texture sample operatio…

Assignees

• Sprangle Eric
• Intel Corp

Inventors

• Sprangle Eric

Classifications

• G09G5/00 Primary

  Physics · mapped topic

• G09G2340/10

  Physics · mapped topic

• G06F8/41

  Physics · mapped topic

• G09G2360/121

  Physics · mapped topic

• G06T15/04

  Physics · mapped topic