Patent ID: 8558836

Claim:
An apparatus, comprising: a hardware-based shader pipe array configured to accept texture instructions for a specified set of pixels, vertices, primitives, surfaces, or compute work items and to generate output data; a hardware-based level one texture cache system configured to store the texture output data; and a hardware-based texture mapping unit configured to: retrieve texture output data from the level one texture cache system and generate formatted accumulated interpolation data, wherein the texture mapping unit further comprises: a pre-formatter module configured to accept texel data and generate normalized fixed point texel data; an interpolator module configured to perform an interpolation on the normalized fixed point texel data from the pre-formatter module and generate re-normalized floating point texel data; an accumulator module configured to accumulate floating point texel data from the interpolator module; and a format module configured to convert texel data from the accumulator module into a standard floating point representation.