An efficient texture cache for programmable vertex shaders

Vertex texturing is state-of-the-art functionality of the 3D geometry processor. However, it aggravates the bandwidth problem between 3D graphics hardware and external memory besides the per-pixel texturing. Since vertex texturing does not guarantee high locality all over the texture data unlike the per-pixel texturing, we propose a caching scheme that adaptively adjusts its operation by estimating the amount of the locality of access pattern. The proposed cache improves 27.0% of texture loading performance for general test scenes with only 9.6% of hardware overhead.