3D APIs includes common operations to resolve a multisample anti-aliased (MSAA) texture, copy resource, initialize a texture and generate mipmaps and perform other operations. In all such operations, graphics driver logic in control of a graphics processor can program a pixel shader to sample from source texture and write to a destination as render target. For texture initialization, the source is simply written to destination. For MSAA resolve and mipmap generation the graphics processor can output a simple average of the samples color into the non-MSAA destination or the next mip level. This approach enables color compression when writing to destination render target but does not utilize any cleared status that may be set for the source texture.