Apple Inc.
System and method to share GPU resources

Abstract:

The embodiments disclosed herein relate to the field of graphics processing and, without limitation, to techniques to enable efficient sharing of a graphics processing unit (GPU) between user interface (UI) graphics operations and intense compute operations. In certain embodiments, intense compute operations, such as long accumulations, are divided into multiple pieces. A scheduler is added to force context switching if an intense compute operation is blocking timely execution of a UI graphics operation. The division of the intense compute operation is tuned so that the GPU compute queue can drain during approximately the same time required to perform a context switch on the GPU.