Patent ID: 8068120

Claim:
A guard band clipping system in a graphics processor, comprising: a vertex processor configured to convert transformed vertex data to integer screen space data, calculate clipcodes and pass the transformed vertex data downstream in a graphics hardware pipeline, wherein the vertex processor is configured to perform normal processing of transformed vertex data through access to a vertex buffer by a vertex index buffer; and a guard band clipping module coupled to the vertex processor and a guard band arithmetic logic unit coupled to the guard band clipping module, the guard band clipping module configured to determine whether a primitive corresponding to the transformed vertex data is to be clipped and, based on that determination, forward the primitive to the guard band arithmetic logic unit to perform guard band clipping; wherein, responsive to a guard band clipping operation performed by the guard band arithmetic logic unit, the guard band clipping module is further configured to request an interruption of the normal processing by the vertex processor.