Patent ID: 7218291

Claim:
A method for determining at least one value for each pixel fragment of a stream of fragments, the method comprising: selecting a first fragment shader pipeline adapted to execute at least a portion of a fragment shader program on a segment of fragments and having at least one available resource; receiving a fragment in a stream of fragments; reducing a measurement of the available resource of the selected fragment shader pipeline by a resource requirement of the received fragment; dispatching the received fragment to the selected fragment shader pipeline to be processed by the fragment shader program of the selected fragment shader pipeline; dispatching a fragment packet including an attribute of the received fragment to a FIFO; repeating the steps of receiving, reducing, dispatching the received fragment, and dispatching a fragment packet for a first plurality of subsequent fragments in the stream of fragments in response to the measurement of the available resource of the selected fragment shader pipeline not reaching a resource limit value; in response to the measurement of the available resource of the selected fragment shader pipeline reaching the resource limit value, selecting a second fragment shader pipeline adapted to execute at least a portion of a fragment shader program on a segment of fragments and having at least one available resource; and repeating the steps of receiving, reducing, dispatching the received fragment, and dispatching a fragment packet for a second plurality of subsequent fragments in the stream of fragments in response to the measurement of the available resource of the selected fragment shader pipeline not reaching a resource limit value.