Patent ID: 7545382

Claim:
A graphics system, comprising: a graphics processing unit (GPU) for processing commands for generating a graphics surface; the graphics system having a plurality of different kinds of rendering modes for the GPU wherein each rendering mode has a corresponding different kind of tile storage format defining a tile format and organization of data within the tile with each tile storage format including a packing mode and a compression mode for data stored in the tile; a partitioned graphics memory system having a plurality of partitions, the partitioned graphics memory system adapted to store graphics data for a region of said graphics surface utilizing a tile storage format selected from the plurality of different tile storage formats in which each individual tile is stored in one partition, has a data size capable of holding data for a spatial region corresponding to a group of pixels, and spatial regions of pixels are mapped to individual blocks of memory with each block including at least one tile; said graphics system configured to utilize page table entries describing the kind of storage format utilized to store said graphics data generated by the GPU for the rendering mode for use by at least one client to perform address translation; wherein a set of fields in the page table entries specifies the compression type of each tile, the packing mode for packing graphics data in each tile and a translation of physical addresses to raw addresses corresponding to dynamic random access memory row, column, bank and partition addresses.