PAGE PRELOADING USING PAGE CHARACTERIZATION DATA

Circuits, methods, and apparatus that pre-load data that may be needed by a graphics processor to render upcoming scenes. One example determines one or more possible upcoming scenes or views. To save computing resources, the possible upcoming scenes are not fully rendered, but the addresses, and corresponding pages, of data that would be needed to render the scenes are determined. Page usage information is also gathered. Pages that would be needed to render the upcoming scenes, but which are not resident in memory, are read in from a disk drive and stored in memory before they are needed. Pages that are infrequently used are removed from physical memory. In this way, when the scene changes, a large number of page faults do not occur in one frame, rather, they are distributed among several frames.