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Abstract

A graphics system includes an accelerated graphics port (AGP) bus to the graphics accelerator. The graphics accelerator includes a 3D-graphics engine that renders textures, and a local graphics memory. Preferably, the local graphics memory is an embedded DRAM on the graphics-accelerator chip. A portion of the personal computer's main memory is set aside as an AGP memory for storing textures for 3D-graphics rendering. High-level application programs create textures in the AGP memory. A 3D graphics software driver that controls the graphics accelerator manages a texture cache in the local graphics memory. When the high-level application requests that the 3D graphics driver render a texture in the AGP memory, the 3D graphics driver moves the texture to the texture cache. Once the texture has been copied from the AGP memory, over the AGP bus to the texture cache in the local graphics memory, the 3D graphics engine begins rendering the texture. The 3D graphics driver manages the texture cache, invalidating least-recently-used textures and de-fragmenting blocks of textures in the texture cache. The 3D driver transfers the texture to the texture cache, rather than the high-level application. The high-level application is not aware of the texture cache and can use a single handle to the texture. The benefits of the AGP Execute model are achieved without adding AGP-texturing hardware to the 3D graphics accelerator.

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