processed by the geometry engine 335 and rasterizer 340 and passed to the shader core 350 the shader core 350 provides data to the texture cache subsystem 360 and shader backend 370 the shader core and shader backend textures the primitives for example according to a shader program that is preloaded by a driver more details on shaders and their programs are available in u s patent application ser no 09 885 242 titled programmable pixel shading architecture filed jun 19 2001 and u s application ser no 09 885 382 titled system method and computer program product for a programmable pixel processing model with instruction set filed jun 19 2001 both of which are incorporated by reference in a specific embodiment of the present invention the texture cache subsystem inspects the next several lines of the shader program to determine which textures will be needed the texture cache subsystem retrieves the corresponding texture descriptors from the graphics memory 310 using the frame buffer interface 320 the corresponding texture descriptors retrieved from the graphics memory 310 contain information such as location stride filtering height width and other parameters necessary for the retrieval of the textures themselves from the graphics memory the texture cache subsystem 360 is then able to retrieve the textures from the graphics memory 310 via the frame buffer interface 320 the textures may then be cached in the texture cache subsystem 360 specific examples of how this may be done may be found in u s pat no 6 629 188 titled circuit amp method for prefetching data for a texture cache by.