Patent ID: 7196710

Claim:
A 3D graphics system including: a producer that outputs graphics commands, said producer comprising a microprocessor; a consumer that consumes the graphics commands outputted by the producer, said consumer comprising graphics hardware including a cache/command processor and pipelined graphics components that transform and rasterize polygons for display; and a shared memory coupled to the producer and to the consumer, the shared memory having plural buffers allocated therein, said plural buffers each receiving and temporarily storing graphics commands outputted by the producer for delivery to the consumer, at least some of said commands comprising polygon vertex commands, wherein the producer and the consumer are capable of accessing each said buffer independently of one another, wherein said buffers store inline commands calling display lists comprising further graphics commands including polygon vertex commands for execution by said graphics hardware, said display lists being stored elsewhere in said shared memory, wherein said polygon vertex commands are provided to said pipelined graphics components, said pipelined graphics components generating images based at least in part on said polygon vertex commands.