Patent ID: 7973804

Claim:
A method of rendering image data in a software pipeline executed by a plurality of parallel threads of execution resident in an interconnected set of hardware-based processing elements, wherein the interconnected set of hardware-based processing elements includes a plurality of nodes interconnected to one another in a Network On Chip (NOC) arrangement, the method comprising: in each of a plurality of pixel fragment generators defined in a first stage of the software pipeline, generating a plurality of pixel fragment data sets for geometric objects in a scene; for each pixel fragment data set generated by the plurality of pixel fragment generators, dynamically selecting a pixel shader in a pixel shader pool that includes a plurality of pixel shaders defined in a second stage of the software pipeline to handle such pixel fragment data set and routing such pixel fragment data set to the selected pixel shader, wherein dynamically selecting includes load balancing across the pixel shader pool; and with each pixel shader in the pixel shader pool, processing each pixel fragment data set routed thereto by applying a texture to each pixel associated with such pixel fragment data set and updating each such pixel in a frame buffer.