Described herein is a method for allocating resources of a graphics processing unit (GPU). Methods as described herein can include assembling a plurality of work nodes having defined inputs and outputs, wherein at least one work node is a rendering work node and at least one work node is a compute work node. A schedule can be created for the plurality of work nodes based at least on the defined inputs and outputs, wherein the plurality of work nodes can be scheduled such that more than one GPU process can be carried out at a point in time. Additionally, the schedule can be created such that both render nodes and compute nodes can use the same GPU resources either simultaneously or at separate times. For example, the GPU does not need to be partitioned where certain resources are only for compute processes and others are reserved for rendering processes. A set of system resource barriers can be determined for processing the set of work nodes based on the created schedule.