A method and apparatus for efficiently handling texture sampling is described herein. A compiler or other software is capable of breaking a texture sampling operation for a pixel into a pre-fetch operation and a use operation. A processing element, in response to executing the pre-fetch operation, delegates computation of the texture sample of the pixel to a hardware texture sample unit. In parallel to the hardware texture sample unit performing a texture sample for the pixel and providing the result, i.e. a textured pixel (texel), to a destination address, the processing element is capable of executing other independent code. After an amount of time, the processing element executes the use operation, such as a load operation to load the texel from the destination address.