Importance

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Abstract

In a 3D interactive computer graphics system such as a video game display system, polygon vertex data is fed to a 3D graphics processor/display engine via a vertex cache used to cache and organize indexed primitive vertex data streams. The vertex cache may be a small, low-latency cache memory local to the display engine hardware. Polygons can be represented as indexed arrays, e.g., indexed linear lists of data components representing some feature of a vertex (for example, positions, colors, surface normals, or texture coordinates). The vertex cache can fetch the relevant blocks of indexed vertex attribute data on an as-needed basis to make it available to the display processor--providing spatial locality for display processing without requiring the vertex data to be prestored in display order. Efficiency can be increased by customizing and optimizing the vertex cache and associated tags for the purpose of delivering vertices to the graphics engine--allowing more efficient prefetching and assembling of vertices than might be possible using a general-purpose cache and tag structure.

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First Claim