In an embodiment, a display pipe processes video data for visual display. The display pipe may read the video data from memory, and may employ QoS levels with the memory requests to ensure that enough data is provided to satisfy the real time display requirements. The display pipe may include a pixel buffer that stores pixels that are ready for display. Additionally, the display pipe may include one or more input buffers configured to store input video data to be processed and/or one or more output buffers configured to store processed data that is ready for blending into the final pixels for display. The display pipe determine a number of output equivalent pixels in the data in the input and output buffers, and may consider those pixels as well as the ready pixels in the pixel buffer in determining the QoS levels for requests.