1. A unified shader comprising: an input interface for receiving a packet from a rasterizer; a shading processing mechanism configured to produce a resultant value from said packet by performing one or more shading operations, wherein said shading operations comprise both texture operations and color operations and comprising at least one ALU/memory pair operative to perform both texture operations and color operations wherein texture operations comprise at least one of: issuing a texture request to a texture unit and writing received texture values to the memory and wherein the at least one ALU is operative to read from and write to the memory to perform both texture and color operations; and an output interface configured to send said resultant value to a frame buffer.