Patent ID: 7978199

Claim:
A method for managing memory usage in a three-dimensional computer graphics system, the method comprising the steps of: dividing a scene to be textured and shaded into a plurality of rectangular areas, each area comprising a plurality of picture elements in the scene; deriving a list of objects for each rectangular area, each list comprising objects which may be visible in the scene; removing from each list all objects that do not contribute to the final textured and shaded scene; determining depth and stencil data for each object in the scene; compiling a buffer of tags for the frontmost visible object for each pixel within the scene; reducing the list of objects to be rendered by using the depth and stencil data for hidden surface removal in combination with the buffer of tags; and texturing and shading each rectangular area using the reduced lists of objects for each rectangular area, wherein the removing step comprises the step of processing the buffer of the tags to regenerate the object list for each tile for only those objects required to correctly render the scene, the object list being subsequently rendered in the texturing and shading step.