Method and system for interactive graphics streaming

A method of streaming interactive computer graphics from a server to a client device, wherein the client device includes local storage and a client-side graphical processing unit (GPU), the method including:

• a) intercepting, at the server, graphics instructions transmitted from an application destined for a graphical processing unit (GPU) at the server, wherein the application is being executed at the server;
• b) processing the graphics instructions to generate graphics data at the server, wherein the graphics data includes a vertex buffer, wherein the vertex buffer is divided into blocks, and wherein the vertex buffer is further divided into stripes corresponding to different vertex fields;
• c) generating index information for at least some of the graphics data at the server, including particular index information that indexes one or more portions of the vertex buffer that have been modified due to execution of one or more of the graphics instructions, wherein the index information is generated for a run of blocks in the vertex buffer that have been modified, and wherein individual values of the index information are generated for individual ones of the stripes that have been modified;
• d) transmitting the index information in place of the graphics data from the server to the client device, wherein the transmitted index information includes the particular index information that indexes the one or more portions of the vertex buffer that have been modified;
• e) extracting, by the client device, corresponding graphics data that corresponds to the graphics data, wherein the corresponding graphics data is stored in the local storage, and wherein extracting the corresponding graphics data utilizes the transmitted index information;
• and
• f) rendering computer graphics by the client-side graphical processing unit (GPU) using the corresponding graphics data and the transmitted index information.