Patent attributes
One embodiment of the present invention sets forth a technique for specifying scene programs, where the effect of executing a particular scene program is to generate a sequence of graphics commands. The application programming interface is extended to include calls used to specify a high-level scene program. Upon receiving a high-level scene program, the graphics driver generates a machine code scene program. When an application program emits a call to execute one or more machine code scene programs, the graphics driver transmits corresponding scene programs execution commands to the graphics pre-processing unit. For each scene program execution command, the graphics pre-processing unit processes instructions, programmatically reconfigures the graphics pipeline based on the execution of the machine code scene program, and launches one or more parallel threads that execute commands within the graphics pipeline. Advantageously, using scene programs, application developers may tailor application programs to more effectively dispatch tasks to the GPU.
