An apparatus, method, and article of manufacture for providing compatibility between an application program and a renderer executing on a computer. An application program, executed by the computer, receives commands from a user via the input device and generates an output command stream in response thereto, wherein the output command stream comprises one or more instructions for generating the graphic images. A version renderer program, executed by the computer and coupled to the application pro...

A method and apparatus for parallel processing of graphics data are described. A number of color components are stored in a floating point format in at least one register of a set of 128-bit registers in a packed format. The color components in the floating point format are converted to numbers in an integer format. The numbers in the integer format are placed in at least one register of a set of 64-bit registers in the packed format. Color components are assembled for image pixels from the numb...

An interface for a graphics system includes simple yet powerful constructs that are easy for an application programmer to use and learn. Features include a unique vertex representation allowing the graphics pipeline to retain vertex state information and to mix indexed and direct vertex values and attributes; a projection matrix value set command; a display list call object command; and an embedded frame buffer clear/set command.

A display subsystem supports both normal mode and portrait mode displays. In normal mode, the scan starts at the upper left comer of the display. In portrait mode, the scan starts at the lower left comer of the display. The display subsystem includes a dual mapped display memory having a normal mode display area and a portrait mode display area. The portrait mode display area is defined by X-ofst.sub.(Virtual) and Y-ofst. X-ofst.sub.(Virtual) is a power of two that is greater than the real X-ofs...

A format varying computing system including a computer linked to a display and input device, the computer including memory devices linked to a processing unit and a set of counters residing in the processing unit and linked to the memory devices, the set of counters defining a symbol residing in the memory devices.

In order to reduce degradation of the processing performance of the data processor due to use of a part of the main memory as a display frame buffer, when an access request to the memory 200 is generated from the CPU 310, the memory controller 400 holds it once, requests the display controller 560 to stop the access to the memory 200 which is in execution, when data to the access executed already is transferred from the memory 200, holds it, and transfers the access request from the CPU bus 310 ...

The monitor system comprises the display device which has a screen having a display area virtually divided into a plurality of sub-screens. Provided are graphics adapters, each of which has two frame buffers, so as to correspond to the sub-screens of the display device.

A method and apparatus for implementing a dynamic display memory is provided. A memory control hub suitable for interposition between a central processor and a memory includes a graphics memory control component. The graphics memory control component determines whether operands accessed by the central processor are graphics operands. If so, the graphics memory control component transforms the virtual address supplied by the central processor to a system address suitable for use in locating the g...

A method, computer program product, and graphics processor for stereoscopically displaying a primitive on a display device adds a row of pixels to the primitive to improve its appearance on the display device. To that end, it first is determined if the primitive is to be stereoscopically displayed on the display device. After it is determined that the primitive is to be stereoscopically displayed, then a row of pixels is added to the primitive. The primitive preferably is a point primitive or a ...

A buffer facilitates reordering of incoming memory access commands so that the memory access commands may be associated automatically according to their row/bank addresses. The storage capacity in the buffer may be dynamically allocated among groups as needed. When the buffer is flushed, groups of memory access commands are selected for flushing whose row/bank addresses are associated, thereby creating page coherency in the flushed memory access commands. Batches of commands may be flushed from ...