Patent ID: 7808504
Filing Date: 2010-10-05
Classification: G06F,G06T,G09G

Abstract:
1. A PC-based computing system having an integrated graphics subsystem supporting parallel graphics processing operations across a plurality of different graphics processing units (GPUs) from same or different vendors, in a manner transparent to graphics applications, said PC-based computing system comprising: system memory for storing software graphics applications, software drivers and graphics libraries; an operating system (OS), stored in said system memory; one or more graphics applications, stored in said system memory, for generating a stream of graphics commands and geometrical data supporting the representation of one or more 3D objects in a scene having 3D geometrical characteristics and the viewing of images of said one or more 3D objects in said scene during an interactive process carried out between said PC-based computing system and a user thereof; one or more graphics libraries, stored in said system memory, for storing data used to implement said stream of graphics commands and geometrical data; a central processing unit (CPU) on a motherboard for executing said OS, said graphics applications, and said graphics libraries; a CPU bus; a display surface for displaying said images by graphically displaying frames of pixel data; a graphics subsystem integrated within said PC-based computing system and supporting parallel graphics processing operations across a plurality of different graphics processing units (GPUs) supplied from the same or different vendor, and in a manner transparent to said one or more graphics applications, and wherein said graphics subsystem includes a graphics controller hub (GCH) chip located on said CPU bus, and having Multi-Pipeline Core Logic (MP-CL) circuitry including a routing unit and a control unit; a plurality of vendor-supplied software GPU drivers, stored in said system memory, for said plurality of different GPUs; a plurality of software multi-pipe drivers, stored in said system memory, and including (i) a first software module for profiling and analyzing said graphics application, including analyzing incoming commands, and collecting and analyzing parameters including performance data selected from the group consisting of memory speed, memory usage in bytes, total pixels rendered, geometric data entering rendering, frame rate, workload of each GPU-driven pipeline core, load balance among said GPU-driven pipeline cores, volumes of transferred data, textures count, and depth complexity, and (ii) a second software module for controlling said parallelization mode of operation;