SYSTEM AND METHOD FOR PERFORMING HIGH-PRECISION MULTI-CHANNEL BLENDING USING MULTIPLE BLENDING PASSES

A high-precision multi-channel blending operation replaces a single pass blending operation to overcome distortions resulting from an insufficient number of bits available per pixel in a hardware frame buffer. A desired frame buffer configuration, with a fewer number of channels, and a larger number of bits available per channel than available for a single pass blending operation, is specified and allocated in memory. The same, fewer number of channels from a destination image are written into the frame buffer. The frame buffer is configured for blending, and the same, fewer number of channels from the source image are blended into the frame buffer. The contents of the frame buffer is written into a memory location. The above steps are repeated, until all of the channels have been blended and written into different parts of memory. The channel information from the memory locations are combined to form an image having a user-desired bit resolution.