Patent ID: 7477266

Claim:
Apparatus for compositing digital images comprising a programmable graphics processor including a fragment processor, the fragment processor comprising subunits configured by codewords to perform a plurality of point compositing operations, comprising: a gatekeeper unit configured to receive digital image data representing a first source image including first fragment data defined by vertices from a local memory coupled to the programmable graphics processor; the gatekeeper being further configured to receive shader program instructions state bundles and data from a rasterizer, a shader unit or a feedback output generated by a combiner during one of multiple passes through the fragment processor; a shader back end unit configured to process the digital image data stored in the local memory on a point basis using the shader program instructions to determine the codewords to generate composited image data comprising fragment data, the data being read from a single (x,y) location in the first source image and rewritten to a single (x,y) location in the composited image data; the shader back end unit being further configured to receive additional digital image data of at least one additional digital image representing a second source image including neighboring fragment data defined in part by different points (x,y) from the graphics memory; the second source image being capable of separate display from the first source image and a remap unit cooperating with the shader back end and configured to receive image data fed back by the combiner and to process the composited image data and the additional digital image data using at least one further point compositing operation defined by one or more of the codewords, the point compositing operation comprising reading a fragment from a single (x,y) location in each of the source images and writing the fragment to a single (x,y) location in the composited data image to generate further composited destination image data based on one or more of the points in each of the first and second source images being processed by the fragment processor utilizing one or more different ones of a plurality of compositing operations prior to being combined in the destination image, the processing including a region compositing operation including acquiring neighboring fragment data comprising fragment data from two (x,y) locations in one of the source images and writing a composited fragment to the one (x,y) location in the composited destination image; the first and second source images being combined over all of the first and second source images to define the composited image data as a composited frame.