US Patent Issued to Microsoft Technology Licensing on June 2 for "Remote depth buffer compression" (German Inventors)

ALEXANDRIA, Va., June 2 -- United States Patent no. 12,646,218, issued on June 2, was assigned to Microsoft Technology Licensing LLC (Redmond, Wash.).

"Remote depth buffer compression" was invented by Christian Voss-Wolff (Herzberg am Harz, Germany) and Norbert Clemens Kern (Kirchberg an der Murr, Germany).

According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "A high dynamic range (HDR) depth buffer is received at a remote computer. The HDR depth buffer is formed into a plurality of tiles. For each tile, a respective maximum and minimum value of the HDR depth buffer in a region greater than a width of the respective tile is determined. An initial pair of piecewise bilinear bounding functions for the HDR depth buffer ...