Textureinheit

A Texture Mapping Unit (TMU) is a hardware component of modern graphics that filters textures for texture mapping of objects and provides the shader.

A texture unit consists of Texture Addressing Units, which are responsible for addressing the texture-internal data, and Texture Filtering Units, which can modify this data by applying filters. In modern graphics cards, several TMUs are integrated directly into the graphics pipeline, while they were still separate processors when they were introduced. The number of texture units is one way to make a statement about the performance of a graphics card.

The introduction of textures meant that textures were no longer stored in conventional memory, but in the RAM of the graphics card. The use of texture units brings an enormous increase in speed when multiple textures are superimposed on one another and the same render object. The reason for this is that surfaces to be textured need not be recalculated from scratch on every rendering run. A simple rectangle to be textured does not need to be computed again and stored in the fragment buffer, provided with a texture, and then with a second rectangle, which must also be calculated, stored, texturized and then combined with the first rectangle. Thus, if multiple texture units are available (and supported by the application software), the object to be rendered needs to be calculated and stored by the graphics card only once, and the existing textures from the texture units are simply added to the object one at a time applied. Weblinks Edit sourcetext

wiki