Patent ID: 7886116

Claim:
A method for decompressing data for a thread group LOAD operation, the method comprising: receiving a request from a shader engine to read thread group data from a memory partition in a frame buffer memory, wherein the thread group data was written to the frame buffer memory by a thread group that includes a plurality of threads executing simultaneously within the shader engine and was compressed into a first number of subpackets and stored in the memory partition, each subpacket representing an amount of data that can be written to the memory partition in one clock cycle, and wherein the thread group data comprises scalar values, and each thread in the thread group wrote either (i) a first scalar value to the frame buffer memory, or (ii) one of the first scalar value or a second scalar value to the frame buffer memory; determining that the thread group data was compressed into the first number of subpackets based on a compression tag setting; and reading each of the first number of subpackets from the memory partition.