US Patent 7245299 Bicubic surface real-time tesselation unit

The present invention provides a graphics processing unit for rendering objects from a software application executing on a processing unit in which the objects to be rendered are transmitted to the graphics processing unit over a bus as control points of bicubic surfaces. According to the method and system disclosed herein, the graphics processing unit includes a transform unit, a lighting unit, a renderer unit, and a tessellate unit for tessellating both rational and non-rational object surfaces in real-time.