AN INTEGRATED GRAPHICS PROCESSOR HAVING A BLOCK TRANSFER ENGINE FOR AUTOMATIC GRAPHIC OPERATIONS IN A GRAPHICS SYSTEM

The present invention discloses methods and apparatus for implementing automatic graphics operations with selectable triggering mechanism. One mechanism is hardware related, using the vertical counter in the video control section of the graphics processor. The other mechanism is software related, using the host to directly command the graphics processor. The graphics operations are specified in the header file written by the host in the frame buffer memory. Several header files can be chained together to form a sequence of header files corresponding to very complex graphics operations. Automatic graphics operations, therefore, can be completed without further host intervention resulting in powerful graphics, video, and animation performance.