Patent ID: 7324112

Claim:
A method for processing a group of related divergent graphics samples in a programmable graphics processing unit having a recirculating pipeline implemented as a single instruction multiple data (SIMD) architecture, the method comprising: configuring each of a plurality of programmable computation units by a field of codewords to perform an operation on multiple samples, incrementing a subroutine depth of a first sample of the related divergent samples to designate that a first call instruction and a first return instruction are to be executed on the first sample; determining whether the first call instruction includes a call return that contains a second call instruction and modifying the state data of each of the samples to indicate a number of call returns associated with each of the samples; pushing state data of a second sample of the related divergent samples upon which the first call and the first return instructions are not to be executed onto a global stack to define the second sample as idle; dispatching a token associated with the samples into the pipeline along with all samples in the group of related divergent samples, executing the first call instruction and the first return instruction on the first sample, but not the second sample; and storing the processed divergent samples for output or display.