Patent ID: 8233004

Claim:
A graphics pipeline configured to process non-blended color data of multi-sampled pixels, the graphics pipeline comprising: a shader engine configured to generate shaded pixels in a reduced form that includes a single color value and a coverage mask that identifies one or more samples of the shaded pixel associated with the single color value based on a currently rasterized geometric primitive; and a color raster operations (CROP) unit configured to: accumulate a plurality of shaded pixels in reduced form from the shader engine, wherein the plurality of shaded pixels correspond to a tile of contiguous pixels stored in a memory, determine whether the plurality of shaded pixels are fully covered by the geometric primitive and whether the tile is stored in a compressed format, wherein the compressed format includes only one color value for each pixel associated with the tile, and if the plurality of shaded pixels are fully covered by the geometric primitive and the tile is stored in the compressed format, then, for each of the plurality of shaded pixels, blending the single color value associated with the shaded pixel with the one color value associated with the corresponding pixel in the tile to generate a blended pixel, or if the plurality of shaded pixels are not fully covered by the geometric primitive, then, for each of the plurality of shaded pixels, expanding the single color value associated with the shaded pixel to generate individual samples associated with the shaded pixel and blending each of the individual samples with a corresponding sample associated with the corresponding pixel in the tile to generate the blended pixel.