Patent ID: 7518616

Claim:
A graphics accelerator for processing a graphical image, the graphics accelerator comprising: a single texture buffer for storing texture maps and data relating to the texture maps stored in the texture buffer; and a plurality of texture processors that perform texturing operations on the graphical image, the plurality of the texture processors retrieving texture packets from the single texture buffer, each texture processor including a fetching engine that retrieves the texture packets, each texture packet being stored in the texture buffer and being associated with a texture map that is different than the texture maps associated with any other texture packet in the texture buffer, each texture packet including data relating to the location of its associated texture map in the texture buffer and data relating to the dimensional type of that texture packet's associated texture map; wherein at least one of said texture processors is configured to convert the associated texture map to a one dimensional texture map by defining a plurality of data blocks within the texture map and then assigning a sequence number to each of the data blocks; and wherein if said data blocks are consecutive in the texture map, they are stored next to each other in memory locations.