Patent ID: 8836700

Claim:
A method for providing tessellated primitive data to a geometry shader, the method comprising: computing a new set of tessellated vertices and a new set of connectivity information in a tessellation engine based on an original set of vertices and an original set of connectivity information; transmitting, via a first transmission, the original set of vertices and the new set of tessellated vertices from the tessellation engine to a vertex shader; transmitting, via a second transmission, the new set of connectivity information for the original set of vertices and the new set of tessellated vertices from the tessellation engine to the geometry shader without going through the vertex shader, wherein the second transmission is separate from the first transmission; generating modified vertex data in the vertex shader based on the original set of vertices and the new set of tessellated vertices; transmitting, from the vertex shader to the geometry shader, a subset of the modified vertex data based on the new set of connectivity information; and processing primitives defined by the subset of the modified vertex data.