Patent ID: 7773090

Claim:
A method for operating a kernel-mode graphics driver in a central processing unit, the method comprising: in a kernel-mode segment of an application thread that executes an application program: determining whether the central processing unit has at least two cores; and in the event that the central processing unit has at least two cores: creating an auxiliary thread for communicating with a graphics processing unit; binding the application thread to a first core of the at least two cores; receiving a first graphics command originating from the application program; and writing the first graphics command to a shared memory accessible to the auxiliary thread; in the event that the central processing unit has at least two cores, in the auxiliary thread: binding the auxiliary thread to a second core of the at least two cores; reading the first graphics command from the shared memory; and transmitting a hardware-level instruction corresponding to the first graphics command to the graphics processing unit; and in the event that the central processing unit has only one core, operating in a single-core mode.