There are special processor cores in GPU to deal with textures!
WJM
Looking this up, I found that texture mapping unit (TMU) at one point was a discrete processor, but know is typically implemented as a stage in the gpu pipline. I think it just boils down the need to do a very large matrix multiply. And I imagine there are a lot of hardware shortcuts this unit can take since pure accuracy is not a requirement for texture mapping, speed is typically a higher priority.
There are special processor cores in GPU to deal with textures!
Looking this up, I found that texture mapping unit (TMU) at one point was a discrete processor, but know is typically implemented as a stage in the gpu pipline. I think it just boils down the need to do a very large matrix multiply. And I imagine there are a lot of hardware shortcuts this unit can take since pure accuracy is not a requirement for texture mapping, speed is typically a higher priority.