DETAILED ACTION
Status
This Office Action is responsive to claims filed on 12/09/2024. Please note Claims 1-20 are pending and have been examined.
Notice of Pre-AIA or AIA Status
The present application, filed on or after March 16, 2013, is being examined under the first inventor to file provisions of the AIA .
Claim Rejections - 35 USC § 102
The following is a quotation of the appropriate paragraphs of 35 U.S.C. 102 that form the basis for the rejections under this section made in this Office action:
A person shall be entitled to a patent unless –
(a)(1) the claimed invention was patented, described in a printed publication, or in public use, on sale or otherwise available to the public before the effective filing date of the claimed invention.
Claims 1, 2, 5, 6, 8, 9, 12-15, 18 and 19 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 102(a)(1) as being anticipated by Griffais (US 20190232164 A1).
Regarding Claim 1, Griffais discloses a system comprising:
a memory device ([0034] “The memory 208 (or non-transitory computer-readable media 208) may include volatile and nonvolatile memory, removable and non-removable media implemented in any method or technology for storage of information”); and
a processing device coupled to the memory device, the processing device to perform operations comprising ([0034] “The computer-readable media 208 may be implemented as computer-readable storage media (“CRSM”), which may be any available physical media accessible by the processor(s) 202/204 to execute instructions stored on the memory 208.”):
receiving a set of compiled shader programs associated with an instance of an application hosted by an application hosting platform, wherein the set of compiled shader programs are included in an shader cache associated with the application, the shader cache hosted by the application hosting platform ([0015] “In some embodiments, a client machine is configured to send a request to a remote computing system for compiled shader code relating to a program (e.g., a video game).” [0016] “If, on the other hand, a client machine receives a response from the remote system indicating that the requested shader code is available, the client machine may receive the compiled shader code requested from the remote computing system.”);
detecting that a shader program is referenced during a runtime of the instance of the application ([0014] “The techniques, devices, and systems described herein pertain to reporting information to a remote computing system about compiled shaders as programs are executed on client machines”);
responsive to determining that a compiled version of the referenced shader program is not included in the received set of compiled shader programs, compiling the shader program to generate the compiled version of the shader program ([0015] “If the client machine receives a response from the remote computing system indicating that the compiled shader code is not available, the graphics driver of the client machine, upon program execution, may compile and cache the shaders in a predefined memory location and in association with an application identifier (ID) of the program.”); and
transmitting, to the application hosting platform, a request to modify the shader cache in view of the compiled version of the shader program ([0015] “A client application may generate a set of shader IDs for the compiled shaders, and may send information to the remote computing system, the information including a hardware configuration of the client machine, the application ID of the program, and the set of shader IDs for the compiled shaders. This allows the remote system to collect information from client machines about shaders that are being compiled on those machines.”).
Regarding Claim 2, Griffais discloses the system of claim 1, wherein the operations further comprise: detecting that the instance of the application is terminated ([0013] “An example of such a program, is a video game” implicitly teaches this feature, as the termination of a video game should be detected – otherwise the player would not be able to exit the video game); and determining that a modification condition associated with the instance of the application is satisfied ([0061] “If a matching hardware configuration and a matching application ID are found, this indicates that another client machine 104 with a matching hardware configuration had previously executed the same program (e.g., video game) and compiled shader code during execution of the program, and also that the remote system 106 had subsequently received the compiled shader code and prepared it for redistribution. If this is the case, the process 400 may follow the “yes” route from block 404 to block 406 where the remote system 106 may send the compiled shader code to the requesting client machine 104 for execution by a GPU 204 of the client machine 104 while executing the video game with the application ID on that client machine 104.”).
Regarding Claim 5, Griffais discloses the system of claim 1, wherein the set of compiled shader programs is received during an initialization of the instance of the application ([0014] “The techniques, devices, and systems described herein pertain to reporting information to a remote computing system about compiled shaders as programs are executed on client machines”).
Regarding Claim 6, Griffais discloses the system of claim 1, wherein the operations further comprise: responsive to determining that the compiled version of the referenced shader program is included in the received set of compiled shader programs, executing the compiled version of the referenced shader program ([0016] “Upon execution of the program (e.g., video game), the GPU of the client machine may execute at least the portion of the compiled shader code retrieved from the predefined memory location in lieu of the graphics driver having to create the compiled machine code on its own.”).
Regarding Claim 8, it recites similar limitations of claim 1. The rationale of claim 1 rejection is applied to reject claim 8.
Regarding Claim 9, it recites similar limitations of claim 2. The rationale of claim 2 rejection is applied to reject claim 9.
Regarding Claim 12, it recites similar limitations of claim 5. The rationale of claim 5 rejection is applied to reject claim 12.
Regarding Claim 13, it recites similar limitations of claim 6. The rationale of claim 6 rejection is applied to reject claim 13.
Regarding Claim 14, it recites similar limitations of claim 1. The rationale of claim 1 rejection is applied to reject claim 14.
Regarding Claim 15, it recites similar limitations of claim 2. The rationale of claim 2 rejection is applied to reject claim 15.
Regarding Claim 18, it recites similar limitations of claim 5. The rationale of claim 5 rejection is applied to reject claim 18.
Regarding Claim 19, it recites similar limitations of claim 6. The rationale of claim 6 rejection is applied to reject claim 19.
Claim Rejections - 35 USC § 103
The following is a quotation of 35 U.S.C. 103 which forms the basis for all obviousness rejections set forth in this Office action:
A patent for a claimed invention may not be obtained, notwithstanding that the claimed invention is not identically disclosed as set forth in section 102 of this title, if the differences between the claimed invention and the prior art are such that the claimed invention as a whole would have been obvious before the effective filing date of the claimed invention to a person having ordinary skill in the art to which the claimed invention pertains. Patentability shall not be negated by the manner in which the invention was made.
Claims 7 and 20 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103 as being unpatentable over Griffais (US 20190232164 A1), in view of Wilt (US 10423463 B1).
Regarding Claim 7, Griffais discloses the system of claim 1, but does not expressly disclose wherein the system further comprises a virtual machine instantiated using a cloud computing environment.
However, in the same field of endeavor, Wilt discloses the system further comprises a virtual machine instantiated using a cloud computing environment (Col 4 Line 40, “The provider network 100 may be set up by an entity such as a company or a public sector organization to provide one or more services (such as various types of cloud-based computing or storage) accessible via the Internet and/or other networks to client devices 180A-180N… For example, computing resources offered to client devices 180A-180N in units called “instances,” such as virtual or physical compute instances or storage instances, may make use of particular data volumes, providing virtual block storage for the compute instances.”).
It would have been obvious to one of ordinary skill in the art before the effective filing date of the invention to have modified the system of Griffais with the feature of comprising a virtual machine instantiated using a cloud computing environment. By doing so, “the graphics server may be optimized for processing using the GPU” as taught by Wilt.
Regarding Claim 20, it recites similar limitations of claim 7. The rationale of claim 7 rejection is applied to reject claim 20.
Allowable Subject Matter
Claims 3, 4, 10, 11, 16 and 17 are objected to as being dependent upon a rejected base claim, but would be allowable if rewritten in independent form including all of the limitations of the base claim and any intervening claims.
Conclusion
Any inquiry concerning this communication or earlier communications from the examiner should be directed to CHONG WU whose telephone number is (571)270-5207. The examiner can normally be reached MON-FRI: 9AM-5PM EST.
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If attempts to reach the examiner by telephone are unsuccessful, the examiner’s supervisor, Xiao Wu can be reached at 571-272-7761. The fax phone number for the organization where this application or proceeding is assigned is 571-273-8300.
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/CHONG WU/Primary Examiner, Art Unit 2613
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