Patent ID: 8411105

Claim:
A method for reducing power consumption for graphics architecture on a handheld computing device and rendering an image comprising: receiving a geometric primitive at a raster portion of a graphics pipeline; interpolating said geometric primitive at the raster portion to generate a color value; truncating the color value at the raster portion, wherein said truncating comprises truncating at least one least significant bit of said color value; dithering the resulting truncated color value at the raster portion to produce a truncated dithered color value; outputting the geometric primitive from the raster portion, wherein processing of the truncated dithered color value utilizes less power than processing of the color value and the power used in processing the truncated dithered color value is based on the bitwidth of the truncated dithered color value, wherein the truncated dithered color has a smaller bitwidth than a bitwidth of the color value; and performing a texturing operation on the geometric primitive from the raster portion, wherein said texturing operation is configured to utilize less power for a smaller bitwidth color value than a larger bitwidth color value.