Patent ID: 7042460

Claim:
A method for rasterizing a primitive wherein pixels are stored in a tile-organized memory, the method comprising: a) selecting a smaller tile from smaller tiles included in a larger tile, the selected smaller tile including a vertex of the primitive; b) traversing the smaller tiles included in the larger tile, the traversal starting at the selected smaller tile and sequencing through each smaller tile that has one or more memory locations located within the primitive; and c) rasterizing each smaller tile encountered during step (b), wherein the larger tile is from larger tiles included in a still-larger tile and wherein the method further comprises: d) traversing each larger tile in the still larger tile that has one or more memory locations located within the primitive; and e) applying steps (a), (b), and (c) to each larger tile encountered during step (d); wherein a tile comprises a store of two or more pixels, the tile being addressed using a fractional portion of an address used to access a single pixel, and wherein traversal of the smaller tile, the larger tile and the still-larger tile is performed in order and wherein the traversal excludes tiles that fall entirely outside of the primitive as determined by a rendering apparatus comprising: three edge evaluators, each evaluator initialized with an x and y value from the selected small tile including the vertex of the primitive; three adder trees, each adder tree re-computing a value received from a respective edge evaluator for each x and y location within the tile being rasterized, and an AND function providing a set of values indicative of memory locations within a tile which includes the primitive.