Object Technology Licensing Corporation

E U Sudhakaran

Rajiv Jain

Glenn P Andert

A graphics system enables an automatic choice between existing host rendering programs, existing hardware acceleration methods, and enhanced software acceleration programs for rendering graphic primitives. The graphics system accesses the speed and accuracy characterizations of a hardware accelerator attached to the system. Then, for each graphics primitive available from the enhanced software acceleration programs, the graphics system invention compares the speed and accuracy of the attached hardware accelerator with that of the enhanced software acceleration programs. The graphics system invention then selects which graphics primitives should be rendered by the enhanced software acceleration programs and which graphics primitives should be rendered by the attached hardware accelerator.

Graphics hardware acceleration method, computer program, and system

When an expansion card is installed in a computer system using a computer viewer, an object is created by the computer viewer to represent the card. The computer viewer uses the card object to examine the card for I/O functions present on the card and to obtain resource requirements for each function. The resource requirements are also provided to a resource conflict resolver object which attempts to assign resources to each I/O function on the cards. If the resource conflict resolver is successful in assigning resource to each I/O function, then the resource assignments are also stored in objects. The computer viewer then uses the card objects to store the resource objects in a persistent storage. During a later system boot operation, the booting system creates bus and card recognizer objects which identify expansion buses and cards present in the system and retrieve the function resource objects from the persistent storage to represent each expansion card.

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San Jose, CA, United States of America

E U Sudhakaran