US Patent Issued to Microsoft Technology Licensing on June 17 for "Potentially occluded rasterization" (British Inventor)

ALEXANDRIA, Va., June 19 -- United States Patent no. 12,333,745, issued on June 17, was assigned to Microsoft Technology Licensing LLC (Redmond, Wash.).

"Potentially occluded rasterization" was invented by Martin Jon Irwin Fuller (Warwick, Great Britain).

According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "Examples described herein relate to rendering an image using a reduced fidelity of shading for portions of a triangle that are potentially occluded by other objects. A computer device may pre-populate a potentially occluded depth map in a graphics processing unit (GPU) for a current frame based on depth data of a previous frame, a low resolution depth pre-pass, or a rasterizing occlusion geometry. The GPU may det...