An apparatus and method for managing pipes and planes within a virtual graphics processing engine. For example, one embodiment of a graphics processing apparatus comprises: a graphics processor comprising one or more display pipes to render one or more display planes, each of the one or more display pipes comprising a set of graphics processing hardware resources for executing graphics commands and rendering graphics images in the one or more display planes; and pipe and plane management hardware logic to manage pipe and plane assignment, the pipe and plane management hardware logic to associate a first virtual machine (VM) with one or more virtual display planes and to maintain a mapping between the one or more virtual display planes and at least one physical display plane.