Patent 7577762 was granted and assigned to Nvidia on August, 2009 by the United States Patent and Trademark Office.
A system and method schedules command streams for processing by a variety of consumers. A single command stream is parsed and commands included in the command stream are output to one of the variety of consumers at a time. A pre-emptive scheduling mechanism is used so that a first consumer may yield to a second consumer when the first consumer has received a sufficient amount of commands. The pre-emptive scheduling enables several of the consumers to process commands concurrently. The pre-emptive scheduling mechanism may be implemented by a device driver inserting yield commands into the command stream or by a unit parsing the command stream.