Introduction to Pixel Pipe

 3D Rendering
 ​Why Color ? ​
• Color Jargons
Agenda • Render Target Surface Formats
• How is a Pixel generated ?​
• MSAA
• CPS
• Blending
• Topic to be covered in next session

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 3D Rendering

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Applicatio
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Content

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 3D Rendering – API

• “Application Programming Interface”

• A common language for applications to talk to
graphics hardware, regardless of whose hardware
• Vulkan – cross platform API for high performance 3D
graphics and compute by AMD
• DirectX – dominant API on Microsoft Platforms,
DX12 ULTIMATE is the latest API
• OpenGL – open-source API for rendering of 2D and
3D graphics
• Metal –API created by Apple for 3D graphics and
compute

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 3D Rendering – App to Screen

 App has, in memory, all the objects it might want to draw 3DApp
 App sends to the hardware (by way of the API and the driver) a particular object to

Native apps
be drawn

Web apps
• Where in memory to find it Browser
• A rough description of where it goes
• A description of how to paint it
 Hardware API
• Gets the description of the object from memory (Vertex Fetch)
• Computes where (in the world) the object is supposed to be (Vertex Shading)
• Computes where (on the screen) the object is supposed to be (Clip/Setup)
Driver
• Figures out what pixels make up the object (Rasterization)
• Tests whether the object is hidden behind something else (Depth Test)
• If not hidden
• Paints the pixels based on the description it got from the app (Pixel H/W
Shading)
• Writes the pixel color to the appropriate location in memory (PixelOut)
• Draws the image on the screen based on the colors written to memory
(Display
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 Why Color ??
• A digital display with normal resolution  ~2 million pixels​
• Each pixel needs to have some color value for any image to be
visible onto the screen ​
• Each image is defined by an array of such pixels each with a
specific color value.​
• Each location of the pixel is given by (X,Y) coordinate on the graph ​
• Any bitmapped image (GIF) can be represented by giving the
location and value to each pixel

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 Color Jargons

• Pixel : Picture Element, An Irreducible discrete unit of information in an image or picture ​

• Subspan : group of 2x2 pixels
• BPP : Bits per pixel – 8BPP/16BPP/32BPP/64BPP/128BPP surface formats supported
• MSAA : Multi Sampling Anti Aliasing
• CPS : Coarse Pixel Shading (a group of pixels are shaded as a single Coarse Pixel)​
• Pixel Pipe: screen-space hashed from PSS to NodeX and address hashed from XETLB to PBE
to L3 ​
• Screen space hash: a programmable hash function that maps (x,y) to a given pixel pipe ​
• Address space hash: GPU Virtual Address maps to the physical address space via XETLB

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 How many Colors can
be represented ?
• RGBA, each with 8 bit channel, 256
brightness levels
• R8 – can have values from 0 to 255, 0 being
darkest to 255 being brightest level of red
• A – transparency factor – determines the
opacity of the image
• RGB  256X256X256 = ~ 16.8 million color
values
• RGBA Surface Formats represent the
precision of the Color Spectrum

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 Render Target Formats
• Color supports 64 different Render target surface formats
• Supported RT formats - Xe2-Aspec-RCPBE

• Examples of RT formats for various BPP:

• 8 BPP - R8_UINT
• 16 BPP - R8G8_SNORM
- 16 bits per pixel. 8 bits per channel, Blue, Alpha absent
- Snorm : value lies between -1 and 1. Data stored in 2’s complement form. MSB is sign bit.
- Range of each channel : -127 to 127. snorm value U = integer Value / 127.
• 32 BPP - R16G16_UNORM
- 32bits per pixel, 16 bits per channel, blue and alpha are absent, Range of each channel – 0-65535
- UNORM value lies between 0 and 1
- integer value 65536= 1, UNORM Value = Integer Value/65536
• 64 BPP - R16G16B16A16_UNORM
• 128 BPP - R32G32B32A32_FLOAT
- R32G32B32A32_FLOAT
- 1 bit sign, 8 bits exp, 23 bits mantissa
- Range : (2 − 2−23) × 2127 ≈ 3.4028235 × 1038

• In the memory, the R channel data is stored in LSB, UNORM is stored in MSB

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 How is a pixel generated ??

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 How is a pixel generated ??

• Poly information is rasterized to pixels and hashed across

different slices by the Window Manager (WMunit)
• Each triangle must be rendered as pixels
• All pixels whose center is inside the triangle must be
determined
• Each attribute (position, texture, color) of each triangle
vertex must be interpolated at each pixel
• From WM-HIZ-IZ-PSD-EU-DAPRSS-PFE-PBE

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 Aliasing
• Aliasing is a byproduct of using square dots (pixels) to display an image
• Consider a picture of a black diagonal line over a white background:

• As you can see-especially when zoomed in -- nature of these pixels creates a stair-
stepping effect, which is called aliasing.

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 Multisample anti-aliasing (MSAA)

• Type of anti-aliasing, a technique used in computer graphics

to remove the edge/staircase effect.
• Higher the sampling mode smoother is the edge
• ELG/LNL can support 2X, 4X, 8X, 16X MSAA

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 CPS
• Variable Rate Shading Feature in DX12 –
VRS_Microsoft_Doc
• Lower detailed areas of the frames can be shaded with
lower than pixel rate to save compute energy
• What if we shaded less frequently while keeping all the
coverage information? – That is the idea behind Coarse
Pixel Shading
• Achieve better battery life without significantly affecting
the image quality

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 CPS

• Coarse Pixel Sizes: All ordered pairs in {1,2,4}

X {1,2,4}, e.g (2,4) means 2 pixels in X
direction and 4 pixels in Y direction get shaded
as one coarse pixel (CP)
• Example – 1x2 CP size with 4 samples per pixel
• The pixel shader will be executed once for the
group
• Pixel attribute is evaluated at the center of the
larger “coarse” pixel of size 1×2.
• The overall evaluated output replicates to all
the samples covered by the primitive.

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 Blending
Blended Output = function(Source Color * Source Blend Factor , Destination Color *
Destination Blend Factor)
• Blending is enabled on a global basis by the Color Buffer
Blend Enable state variable (in COLOR_CALC_STATE)
• If there is no alpha value contained in the Color Buffer, a
default value of 1.0 is used and, correspondingly, there is no
alpha component computed by this function
• Destination color is the most current value of color, stored in
memory
• The color value is fetched from memory and blended with the
latest data from shader (Source data)
• B-spec link - Color Buffer Blending

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Color Buffer Blend Functions

Blend Function Operation (for each color component)

BLENDFUNCTION_ADD SrcColor*SrcFactor + DstColor*DstFactor

BLENDFUNCTION_SUBTRACT SrcColor*SrcFactor - DstColor*DstFactor

BLENDFUNCTION_REVERSE_SUBTRACT DstColor*DstFactor - SrcColor*SrcFactor

BLENDFUNCTION_MIN min (SrcColor*SrcFactor, DstColor*DstFactor)

Programming Note: This is a superset of
the OpenGL "min" function.

BLENDFUNCTION_MAX max (SrcColor*SrcFactor,

DstColor*DstFactor)
Programming Note: This is a superset of
the OpenGL "max" function.

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Questions ?

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Topics to be covered

1. Slice hashing, Tiling

2. Generations of Pixel Pipe in Intel GPUs
3. Post EU Pixel Pipe ​Flow
4. Color Frontend – XE2 architecture
5. Color Backend ​– XE2 architecture
6. TRI001 Flow – in GRITS (output image) – Vikas ?
7. Debug flow

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