Method and apparatus for hardware acceleration of graphical fill in display systems

1. Field of the Invention Embodiments of the present invention are directed to a method and apparatus for hardware acceleration of graphical fill in display systems. In one embodiment, a bit-mask is maintained. The bit-mask, termed the "filled color bitmap", has one bit for each pixel of the display data. A register, termed the "filled color register", capable of storing a single color value is maintained. When a write command is executed to fill a portion of the display memory with the same value that is stored in the filled color register, the bits in the filled color bitmap corresponding to the portion of display memory are set equal to 1. In executing other writes, the value is written to display memory and the bits in the filled color bitmap corresponding to the portion of display memory are set equal to 0. In one embodiment, the bitmap is located in a dynamic random access memory (DRAM).