BFM: A Bus-Like Data Feedback Mechanism Between Graphics Processor and Host CPU

Graphics processors have received an increasing attention with the growing demand for gaming, video streaming, and many other applications. During the graphics rendering with OpenGL, host CPU needs the runtime attributes to move on to the next procedure of rendering, which covers almost all the function units of graphics pipeline. Current methods suffer from the memory capacity issues to hold the variables or huge amount of data passing paths which can cause congestion on the interface between graphics processor and host CPU. This paper refers to the operation principle of commuting bus, and proposes a bus-like data feedback mechanism (BFM) to traverse all the pipeline stages and collect the run-time status data or execution error of graphics rendering, then send them back to the host CPU. BFM can work in parallel with the graphics rendering logic. This method can complete the data feedback task easily with only 0.6% increase of resource utilization and has no negative impact on performance, which also obtains 1.3 times speed enhancement compared with a traditional approach.