The present invention uses a novel cache memory allowing a high texture
calculation rate while using a low cost single bank DRAM hardware. In
accordance with this invention, pixels are processed in a cluster, for
example by processing pixels within a region as a cluster of pixels, with
the regions of pixels arranged in a fixed gridwork across the area of the
display with fixed, unchanging boundaries. All polygon-pixels occurrences
within a region are processed together in one operation. Texture
processing for all polygon-pixels within a region are broken down in to a
set of information gathering operations for all polygon-pixels within the
region, followed by a high speed fetching of all needed texels to process
the entire region. Following this, high speed interpolation operations are
preformed via use a specially arranged on chip RAM and a hardware pipeline
calculation.