Patent ID: 8441487

Claim:
A method for compressing data for a thread group STORE operation, the method comprising: receiving uncompressed thread group data from a thread group executing within a shader engine, wherein the thread group includes a plurality of simultaneously executing threads, and the uncompressed thread group data may be written to a memory partition within a frame buffer memory in a first number of subpackets, each subpacket representing an amount of data that can be written to the memory partition in one clock cycle, wherein the thread group data comprises scalar values, and each thread in the thread group is associated with either (i) a first scalar value to be written to the frame buffer memory, or (ii) one of the first scalar value or a second scalar value to be written to the frame buffer memory; determining that the thread group data is compressible; compressing the thread group data into a second number of subpackets, wherein the second number of subpackets is less than the first number of subpackets; and writing each of the second number of subpackets to the memory partition.