Method and apparatus for obtaining sampled positions of texturing operations

The invention discloses a method and apparatus for obtaining sampled positions of texturing operations. Methods and apparatuses are disclosed for reporting texture footprint information. A texture footprint identifies the portion of a texture that will be utilized in rendering a pixel in a scene. The disclosed methods and apparatuses advantageously improve system efficiency in decoupled shading systems by first identifying which texels in a given texture map are needed for subsequently rendering a scene. Therefore, the number of texels that are generated and stored may be reduced to include the identified texels. Texels that are not identified need not be rendered and/or stored. 本发明公开了用于获取纹理操作的采样位置的方法和装置，具体地公开了用于报告纹理占用空间信息的方法和装置。纹理占用空间标识将用于渲染场景中的像素的纹理的部分。所公开的方法和装置通过首先标识给定纹理映射中的哪些纹理像素在随后渲染场景时需要，从而有利地提高了解耦的着色系统的系统效率。因此，所生成和存储的纹理像素的数量可以减少，以包括被标识的纹理像素。没有被标识的纹理像素不需要被渲染和/或存储。