UNIFIED DATA FETCH GRAPHICS PROCESSING SYSTEM AND METHOD

A present invention pixel processing system and method permit complicated three dimensional images to be rendered with shallow graphics pipelines including reduced gate counts and facilitates power conservation by utilizing a single unified data fetch stage (e.g., unified data fetch module) that retrieves a variety of different pixel surface attribute values (e.g., depth, color, and/or texture values) in a single stage. Different types of pixel surface attribute data (e.g., depth, color, texture) associated with multiple graphics processing functions (e.g., color blending, texture mapping, etc.) are retrieved in the single unified data fetch graphics pipeline stage. The pixel surface attribute values may be placed in corresponding variable fields of a pixel packet row. The pixel packet rows including the pixel surface attribute values are forwarded to downstream graphics pipeline stages (e.g., an arithmetic logic pipestage).