Apparatus and method for extending computational precision of a computer system having a modular arithmetic processing unit
Granted: July 3, 2001
Patent Number:
6256656
The integers involved in the computation are embedded into a modular system whose index (i.e., its modulus) is an integer M that is bigger than all of these integers involved. In other words, these integers are treated not as belonging to ordinary integers anymore, but as “modular integers” belonging to the modular system indexed by M. Having completed the embedding, CRT provides the bridge which connects the single modular system indexed by M (ZM) with a collection of k…
Message buffering for a computer-based network
Granted: July 3, 2001
Patent Number:
6256677
A ring computer network system having a communication controller for controller the receipt and sending of packets or messages at each client computer. The interface associated with each client computer includes a send message buffer and a receive message buffer. The send message buffer has a send message buffer counter which increments upwardly in response to messages being received from the client computer for sending on the ring network. The communication controller sends messages…
Method and system for performing floating point operations in unnormalized format using a floating point accumulator
Granted: July 3, 2001
Patent Number:
6256655
A method and system for performing floating point operations in unnormalized format using a floating point accumulator. The present invention provides a set of floating point instructions and a floating point accumulator which stores the results of the operations in unnormalized format. Since the present invention operates on and stores floating point numbers in unnormalized format, the normalization step in the implementation of the floating point operations, which is typically required…
Method and apparatus for efficiently switching state in a graphics pipeline
Granted: June 26, 2001
Patent Number:
6252610
A method and apparatus for multipass rendering of graphics primitives is provided. The apparatus of the present invention includes a graphics pipeline organized as a sequence of tasks. A set of state information blocks are provided for each pipeline tasks. A host processors stores a set of graphics attributes for each task in the state information blocks. The host processor then sends a first token through the graphics pipeline. The first token causes each task to select the state…
Curves and surfaces modeling based on a cloud of points
Granted: June 26, 2001
Patent Number:
6253164
A method of computer curve and surface modeling includes storing in a computer memory a cloud of points associated with an object and least-square fitting one or more curves or surfaces to the cloud of points. The resulting curves or surfaces representative of the object are easier to describe mathematically and require less computer resources to process.
Multi-purpose high resolution distortion correction
Granted: June 19, 2001
Patent Number:
6249289
A high resolution distortion correction system is provided for an arbitrary projection system. First, a field of view is subdivided into multiple viewports. The multiple subdivided viewports provide a first approximation of the distortion. Polygons that are projected onto a particular subdivided viewport are rendered in a frame buffer and stored in texture memory as an intermediate texture image. The intermediate texture images are subsequently applied to a rendered distortion mesh to…
Method, system, and computer program product for allocating physical memory in a distributed shared memory network
Granted: June 19, 2001
Patent Number:
6249802
A method, system, and computer program product for allocating physical memory in a distributed shared memory (DSM) network is provided. Global geometry data is stored that defines a global geometry of nodes in the DSM network. The global geometry data includes node-node distance data and node-resource affinity data. The node-node distance data defines network distances between the nodes for the global geometry of the DSM network. The node-resource affinity data defines resources…
Method and apparatus for culling polygons
Granted: June 12, 2001
Patent Number:
6246415
A method and apparatus provide for preserving hardware resources in connection with a display of complex scenes. Polygons which make up portions of the display can be culled prior to use of the hardware resources. An occlusion parameter for use in the culling operation can be determined in accordance with a monitoring of a plurality of tiles which constitute a display. In particular, a maximum depth value associated with a given tile can be utilized to indicate whether a subsequently…
Method for modeling reflection of light from an anisotropic surface
Granted: June 12, 2001
Patent Number:
6246416
The invention provides a method for performing computer graphic simulation of an anisotropic surface reflecting light towards a viewer. First, the data necessary to calculate the amount of light reflected from each point of the anisotropic surface toward the viewer is obtained. This data includes a statistical description of the surface, as well as information about the light and its directions of incidence and reflection. The data is then sent to a renderer, which calculates the amount…
Liquid crystal flat panel display with enhanced backlight brightness and specially selected light sources
Granted: June 5, 2001
Patent Number:
6243068
A multiple light source flat panel liquid crystal display (LCD) system having enhanced backlight brightness and specially selected light sources. According to the present invention, brightness in the LCD is enhanced by polarization recycling using a pre-polarizing film to pre-polarize light, and a special reflector for recycling light reflected by the pre-polarizing film. In one embodiment, the pre-polarizing film comprises a layer of DBEF brightness enhancement film, and the rear…
High performance low cost video game system with coprocessor providing high speed efficient 3D graphics and digital audio signal processing
Granted: May 29, 2001
Patent Number:
6239810
A low cost high performance three dimensional (3D) graphics system can model a world in three dimensions and project the model onto a two dimensional viewing plane selected based on a changeable viewpoint. The viewpoint can be changed on an interactive, real time basis by operating user input controls such as game controllers. The system rapidly produces a corresponding changing image (which can include animated cartoon characters or other animation) on the screen of a color television…
Method and system for a RISC graphics pipeline optimized for high clock speeds by using recirculation
Granted: May 22, 2001
Patent Number:
6236413
In a computer system including a processor coupled to a memory via a bus, a system for a reduced instruction set graphics processing subsystem. The graphics processing subsystem is configured to accept graphics data from a computer system via a bus. The graphics processing subsystem is deeply pipelined to achieve high bandwidth, and is operable for processing graphics data including a first and second set of graphics instructions. The graphics instructions from the second set are more…
Method, system, and computer program product for fast computation using parallel multi-channel resampling and blending
Granted: May 15, 2001
Patent Number:
6232979
A method, system, and computer program product are provided for fast computation using parallel resampling and blending in multi-channel texture mapping. In one embodiment, slices of projection data for volume rendering are loaded into multiple textures. The loaded textures are combined using multi-channel texture mapping to obtain a multi-channel data frame for storage in a multi-channel frame buffer. The multiple textures are combined using a texture mapping operation that includes a…
System and method for generating planar maps of three-dimensional surfaces
Granted: May 15, 2001
Patent Number:
6232980
Planar texture maps which reflect the distances and angles of a 3-D surface are generated. A user is permitted to manually adjust the balance between discontinuity and distortion. The user selectively modifies the 3-D surface, and by doing so adjusts the balance between discontinuity and distortion in the planar map. Each point on the 3-D surface corresponds to a unique point on the planar map. Operations may therefore be performed on the simpler 2-D planar map rather than the more…
Method for improving texture locality for pixel quads by diagonal level-of-detail calculation
Granted: May 15, 2001
Patent Number:
6232981
In a computer graphics system, a level of detail value is determined by calculating the maximum absolute difference between values of s and t coordinates of pixels diagonally adjacent to each other within a quad of pixels. In particular, the texels needed for the quad of pixels for each of two integer levels of detail surrounding the calculated diagonal level of detail are virtually guaranteed to be within a 4×4 footprint of texels projected into a texture memory. In addition, the…
Hashed direct-mapped texture cache
Granted: May 15, 2001
Patent Number:
6233647
The present invention pertains to an apparatus for and method of mapping texture memory to a texture cache such that cache contention is minimized. Significantly, in one embodiment of the present invention, addresses of the texture memory are mapped to entries of the texture cache according to a predetermined hashing scheme. According to the one embodiment, texture memory is addressed as a virtually contiguous address space by a multi-dimensional index. The multi-dimensional index is…
System and method for fault-tolerant transmission of data within a dual ring network
Granted: May 15, 2001
Patent Number:
6233704
A multiple counter-rotating ring computer network system having a permission control scheme for client isolation. The peripheral channel allows two rings to be folded into one longer ring so that faulty nodes can be effectively removed from the network. Or, any of the rings can be masked so that they are unoperational. The network system also allows several client isolation states ranging from complete isolation to master access. These types of isolation allow faulty client devices to be…
System and method for rendering multi-planar reformations using bi-linear interpolation
Granted: May 8, 2001
Patent Number:
6229547
A view port comprising an oblique slice intersecting a stack of textured images is defined. A polygon associated with the view port slice is divided into multiple polygons, wherein each polygon is clipped to the surface of each intersecting texture. Each intersecting texture is then enabled, one at a time. When each texture is enabled, each polygon intersecting with the enabled texture is drawn. The colors of the vertices that fall within the active textures are maintained according to…
Method and apparatus for performing fast fourier transforms
Granted: May 8, 2001
Patent Number:
6230177
The method and apparatus employ a texture filter in a graphics processor to perform a transform such as, for example, a Fast Fourier Transform. The texturizer can include an array of linear interpolators. The architecture reduces the computational complexity of the transform processes.
Hybrid hypercube/torus architecture
Granted: May 8, 2001
Patent Number:
6230252
A scalable multiprocessor system includes processing element nodes. A scalable interconnect network includes physical communication links interconnecting the processing element nodes in an n-dimensional topology, and routers for routing messages between the processing element nodes on the physical communication links. The routers are capable of routing messages in hypercube topologies of at least up to six dimensions, and further capable of routing messages in at least one n dimensional…
