Patent ID: 8564606

Claim:
A 3-D graphics rendering system, comprising: a source of full-resolution texture data; a tile-based 3-D graphics rendering engine comprising a texturing unit; a tile buffer configured to store portions of an image, as they are being rendered by the tile-based 3-D graphics engine; a system memory separate from the tile buffer; and a texture scaling filter, coupled to the tile buffer and to the main system memory, and configured to first input full-resolution texture data, from the source of full-resolution texture data, for a portion of a texture to be used by the tile-based 3-D graphics rendering engine, to produce a current reduced-resolution version of the inputted texture data, wherein the resolution of the reduced-resolution version is reduced by a scaling factor from the full-resolution texture data, to store the current reduced-resolution version in the tile buffer, to store the current reduced-resolution version in the main system memory, and thereafter to iteratively produce subsequent reduced-resolution versions of the inputted texture data, by scaling, according to the scaling factor, the then-current stored reduced-resolution version, obtained from the tile buffer, to produce a new current reduced-resolution version, and to store the new current reduced-resolution version in the main memory and in the tile buffer as the current reduced-resolution version of the full-resolution texture data, wherein the texturing unit of the tile-based 3-D graphics engine is configured to use texture data from the produced reduced-resolution versions for texturing a surface visible in a tile of an image during rendering by the tile-based 3-D graphics rendering engine.