Patent ID: 8862823

Claim:
A method of storing compression status information for compressible surfaces, the method comprising: allocating storage in a data structure residing within an external memory for the compression status information for the compressible surfaces, wherein the compressible surfaces are represented as a collection of tiles and the data structure includes compression status bits for each one of the tiles; initializing the data structure; and storing a portion of the data structure corresponding to a portion of the compressible surfaces that are accessed during execution of an application program in a compression status cache of a processor that is coupled to the external memory, wherein the compression status cache uses a quotient and a remainder to locate the compression status bits within a cache line, wherein the processor is configured to access a tile using the compression status bits corresponding to the tile, and the compression status information for a tile includes a zero bandwidth clear index that references a clear value stored in a table, and wherein data for the tile is set to the clear value and the data for the tile is not stored in the external memory when a clear flag indicates that the tile is cleared.