Patent 7446780 was granted and assigned to NVIDIA on November, 2008 by the United States Patent and Trademark Office.
Multisampling techniques provide temporal as well as spatial antialiasing. Coverage for a primitive is be determined at multiple sample locations for a pixel. In one embodiment, coverage is determined using boundary equations representing a boundary surface of the primitive in a three-dimensional space-time. A shading value for the primitive is computed for the pixel and stored for each coverage sample location of the pixel that is covered by the primitive. The sample locations are distributed in both space and time, and multiple sample locations share a single shading computation. The multisampling techniques are extendable to other dimensions that correspond to other image attributes.