Patent ID: 8860722

Claim:
A graphics processing system comprising: a scoreboard component for tracking pixels that are still in flight and being worked on in a downstream stage of a pipeline; and a raster component in a processor which eliminates occluded pixels early in said pipeline and color rasterizes non-occluded pixels and stalls screen coincident pixels within said pipeline in accordance with said scoreboard component, wherein said scoreboard component tracks pixels that are still in flight in said raster component and pixels that have passed through said raster component but have not exited a write stage, and said scoreboard and program sequencing handle timing issues arising from some pixels being discarded while other pixels proceed to lower stages of the pipeline, wherein said pixels that are discarded and said other pixels that proceed to lower stages of the pipeline are Z depth rasterized at substantially the same time, wherein said eliminating occluded pixels includes not clocking payload portions of a pixel packet through said pipeline while continuing to clock sideband portions of said pixel packet through said pipeline, and said program sequencing directs execution of indeterminate length shader programs by executing them in portions.