New patent assigned to nVidia..

[nAo]

I know Simon will love this :

Circuit and method for trilinear filtering using texels from only one level of detail

ciao,
Marco

 

[Simon F]

Marco, you know me too well

Now what was it the S3 chip did... oh yes... it did that. ..

 

[Humus]

So basically they are fetching 16 texels from first mipmap level instead of four from each?

 

[Xmas]

So basically they are fetching 16 texels from first mipmap level instead of four from each?

Exactly. I guess this should increase cache efficiency.

 

[Humus]

Doesn't sound very high tech, an average newbie should be able to figure this out. The driver will have to check uploaded textures though to see if it can use this technique at all, if you use color mipmaps or do other mipmap tricks it will fail.

 

[Simon F]

Hmmm I just found an earlier patent which says:

"A lower-level mip-map generator (36) generates portions of the mip-map which is next below, in the hierarchical series, the mip-map of which portions are held in the cache"

Surely the USPTO couldn't have missed that? ;-)