Patent ID: 7843457

Claim:
A 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 geometrical data and graphics commands supporting (i) the representation of one or more 3D objects in a scene having 3D geometrical characteristics and (ii) the viewing of images of said one or more 3D objects in said scene; one or more graphic libraries, stored in said system memory, for storing data used to implement said stream of geometrical data and graphics commands; a central processing unit (CPU) supported on a motherboard, for executing said OS, said one or more graphics applications, said software drivers and said graphics libraries; a CPU bus supported on said motherboard; a bridge chip supported on said motherboard, and including a routing unit located on said CPU bus; a display surface for displaying said images by graphically displaying frames of pixel data; a plurality of GPU-driven pipeline cores arranged in a parallel architecture and operating according to a parallelization mode of operation so that said GPU-driven pipeline cores process data in a parallel manner; a plurality of graphics cards, with one of said plurality of graphics cards having a display interface for interfacing with said display surface, wherein at least one of said plurality of GPU-driven pipeline cores is supported on each said graphics card, and wherein at least one of said plurality of GPU-driven pipeline cores is supported on said bridge chip; and software multi-pipe drivers, stored in said system memory, and including a GPU driver module allowing said GPU-driven pipeline cores to interact with said OS and said graphic libraries, and a distributed graphic functions control module for configuring said parallelization mode of operation; wherein said routing unit interfaces said CPU and said GPU-driven pipeline cores; wherein, for each image of said 3D object to be generated and displayed on said display surface, the following operations are performed: (i) said routing unit routes said stream of geometrical data and graphic commands, or a portion thereof, from said CPU to one or more of said GPU-driven pipeline cores, (ii) one or more of said GPU-driven pipeline cores process said stream of geometrical data and graphic commands, or a portion thereof, during the generation of each said frame of pixel data, while operating in said parallelization mode, so as to generate pixel data corresponding to at least a portion of said image, and (iii) said routing unit routes pixel data output from one or more of said GPU-driven pipeline cores during the composition of each frames frame of pixel data corresponding to a final image, for display on said display surface.