Texture unit
A texture unit ( English texture mapping unit ( TMU )) is a hardware component of modern graphics cards , the textures for the texture mapping filters of objects and the shader provides.
A texture unit (TMU) consists of
- a Texture Addressing Units (TAU), which are responsible for addressing the texture-internal data, and
- a texture filtering unit , which can change this data by using filters .
In modern graphics cards, several TMUs are usually integrated directly into the graphics pipeline , whereas when they were introduced they were still separate processors. The number of texture units is a way of making a statement about the performance of a graphics card.
The introduction of texture units meant that textures no longer had to be stored in conventional memory , but in the RAM of the graphics card. The use of texture units brings an enormous increase in speed when blending several textures on top of one another on one and the same render object. The reason for this is that surfaces to be textured do not have to be recalculated from scratch with every rendering run. A simple rectangle to be textured does not have to be calculated again and saved in the fragment buffer, given a texture, and then with a second rectangle, which also has to be calculated, saved, textured and then combined with the first rectangle. If several texture units are available (and this is supported by the application software), the object to be rendered only needs to be calculated and saved once by the graphics card, and the existing textures from the texture units are simply applied to the object one after the other applied.