1. A method of processing fragment data in a programmable graphics processing pipeline, comprising: receiving graphics data at an execution pipeline, wherein the graphics data has a first portion and a second portion; offloading from the execution pipeline processing operations included in a fragment program and associated with the first portion of the graphics data to a texture unit; configuring fixed function units included within the texture unit with opcodes included in the fragment program to perform at least one texture operation on the first portion of graphics data, wherein the configuring includes decoupling the fixed function units included within the texture unit so that a first fixed function unit is configured to process the first portion of the graphics data and a second fixed function unit is disabled and does not process the first portion of the graphics data; processing the first portion of the graphics data by the first fixed function unit included within the texture unit to produce first fragment data, wherein the first portion of the graphics data is not processed by the execution pipeline; configuring the first fixed function unit within the texture unit with an opcode to output the first fragment data to a storage resource; processing the second portion of the graphics data and the first fragment data retrieved from the storage resource in the execution pipeline to produce second fragment data, wherein each of the fixed function units and the texture unit are not included in the execution pipeline; and outputting the second fragment data directly to an output buffer without passing the second fragment data through the texture unit.