Patent ID: 8044956

Claim:
A method for adaptively rendering antialiased pixels, the method comprising: receiving a geometric primitive; decomposing the geometric primitive into pixel fragments corresponding to pixels that are at least partially covered by the geometric primitive; determining coverage information of the geometric primitive indicating geometric coverage for the pixels that are at least partially covered by the pixel fragments, wherein each pixel includes a center sample; adaptively determining, for each one of the pixel fragments, within a shading unit of a graphics rendering pipeline, whether to shade each said pixel via a multisampling technique or a supersampling technique based on the coverage information, wherein each said pixel is shaded using the multisampling technique if the coverage information indicates that the center sample is covered and, wherein the pixel includes a center sample and a first additional sample, and the pixel is shaded using the supersampling technique if the coverage information indicates that the center sample is not covered but at least the first additional sample is covered; and computing the color of the pixel using the multisampling technique or the supersampling technique, as determined, based on shading information included in the pixel fragment.