Another nVidia/Gigapixel's patent

[nAo]

I haven't read it yet, but it's about rather trivial stuff:
http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-...t00&s1=nvidia&OS=nvidia&RS=nvidia

ciao,
Marco

 

[Ailuros]

Could someone please post a brief explanation what the patent actually adresses?

Thanks in advance.

 

[psurge]

Well i skimmed it and it looks like they have patented basic scan line rasterization - i.e. they rasterize an n-sided convex polygon onto a grid of tiles (i.e. large pixels) to determine which tiles the polygon covers.

For each tile they also compute whether the tile is an interior tile (completely covered by the primitive), a vertex tile (contains a vertex of the primitive) or an edge tile (contains, you guessed it, an edge).

i didn't read it too closely, but that's what it looked like to me...

Serge

 

[Snyder]

yeah, looks the same to me...is this some kind of silly joke, patenting something everyone has used for decades? Or am I missing something?

 

[RussSchultz]

There's more to the patent than "separate the tiles into 3 types". There's a specific algorithm, which is what is key to the patent. This would keep any competitors from going that exact route. It was described to me from our patent lawyer as "laying barracades in your wake", which apparently works well if you're at the front of the pack and slows competitors down as they try to follow in your footsteps.

Beyond that, patent portfolios are all about mutually assured destruction.

Every company has a bunch of em, and they're mostly good for using against people who are using them against you.

Or, when your market space is getting threatened bad enough, push the red button...

 

[OVERLORD]

With talk of tiling and algorithms. Does anyone think they have anyone in particular in mind? Recent memory draws me to TRIDENT XP4.

See here http://www.gamersdepot.com/interviews/trident/xp4/003.htm

GD: How are you able to perform many of the functions your competition does on such a small chip (only 30 million transistors)?

Le: The secret is in the mathematics of multiple-pixel rendering. Our advanced 3D graphics algorithm is optimized for rendering multiple pixels in parallel by intelligent sharing of pixel rendering hardware at strategic stages in the graphics rendering pipelines.

GD: Your technology uses a form of Tile-based rendering. If this technology is so effective why do you think that Kyro went the way of the do-do bird?

Le: Our 3D graphics engine is actually based on immediate-mode rendering, but with a tile-based rasterization engine. We do not implement the tile-based rendering as used in Kyro. The key advantage of tiling in rasterization is much better memory bandwidth utilization as compared to scan-line rasterization. Tiling in rasterization improves memory bandwidth efficiency from 35 to 90 percent.

and here http://www.hardwareaccelerated.com/articles/reviews/graphics/tridentinterview/index3.shtml

The XP4 has a Tile Based Rasterizer, what are its benefits and how exactly do you split the screen up(how big are the tiles, etc)?
The key benefit of a Tile-based Rasterizer is improved memory bandwidth efficiency. Whereas conventional rasterizer stores pixel data in memory along scan lines, which is the easiest thing to do, the penalty is significant memory page miss when rendering triangles. As the result, memory bandwidth utilization can drop as low as 35%. XP4 rasterizer stores data in hierarchical tiles, which enjoys much better memory page hit and brings memory bandwidth utilization as high as 90%. Each tile starts out as small as 4-pixels-by-4-pixels and can be stacked on top of each other to make bigger tiles in a hierarchical fashion. Improving memory bandwidth efficiency is exceedingly important if you don’t want to waste your money in 256-bit memory bus like ATI Radeon 9700.

 

[TheMightyPuck]

I'm not saying this is what is happening here but patents serve two purposes (at least) for a company that lives and dies by it's IP. First, it gives the owner a monopoly for the life of the patent (everyone knows this) and requires people who want to use the technology to pay the owner a licensing fee. Second, patents can be used to defend against other people suing you for infringement. This is because the more patents you have the more chance you can sue someone back when they sue you and gain leverage for a settlement and cross licensing agreement. For this reason Patent counsel would recommend a company patent everything no matter how ridiculous or trivial.

 

[KimB]

This may be the part that is "patentable":

In one specific implementation, the geometry tiler simultaneously identifies edge tiles that are covered by two segments of the convex polygon that are located opposite to each other (such as a top segment and a bottom segment).

Anything else in that patent that another company can show they used before nVidia cannot be held up in a court of law (for long anyway...nVidia could possibly try to use it to run a smaller company into the ground through legal expenses...).

 

[BoddoZerg]

People patent stupid crap all the time. Remember that guy who patented the Y2K bug? He didn't last long in court.

 

[Steelwire]

Never quite understood patents!

If you write your ideas down in the form of a patent it becomes public knowledge. Now, this means all the other engineers in the world find out about it. U C... no engineer worth his salt is just going to simply copy someone elses idea! You've got to beat it! You can steal parts of their ideaz and mix 'em with others and your own and come out with a new algorithm. The relentless pace of technology seems to state that you can't be as good as the patent holder, you have to be better!

If you don't write your ideas down and just hide them in a chip or closed source software most people won't even bother going in there to figure it out. They'll just write their own based on whatever ideas are public or spend a LOT of time inventing something completely new. Given that there are clever people out there who COULD figure it out if they wanted to, what would be the point? It would take so long to do that the original inventor will have moved onto something else presumably better than their original patent.

Which is advantageous... it's difficult to say. I don't know. It may depend on how pivotal the patented mechanism is to your survival.

I think patents (should) have more to do with trapping industiral espionage and direct theft rather than submarine patents to catch people when they "accidently" use an algorithm very similar to yours 5 years down the road.

The third option is the Open Source way of course in which you make the algorithm(s) public and don't even bother (that much) with patents or copyrights. You might even want to claim that you where doing it for the benefit of mankind but there are probably many things that many people shouldn't be told about!

 

[ERP]

Bizarrely enough, the patent system was created to encourage the sharing of ideas. Giving a company/individual some reward/recourse for releasing it's expensive research into the public domain.

Of course it doesn't really work that way. These days patents are generally used in two ways,

1. by large companies to protect themselves from other large companies, "you sue me, I'll sue you". You rarely see these patents put to use or challenged in court, more normally you see some public declaring and a press release about an exchange of IP deal.

2. By IP companies to protect there ideas, and to block competitors from following similar approaches.

There is a third way patents are used are by companies in dire financial situations as a last ditched attempt to raise capital.