Techniques for performing multi-sample anti-aliasing operations are provided. The techniques include detecting an instruction for a multi-sample anti-aliasing load operation; determining a sampling rate of source data for the load operation, data storage format of the source data, and loading mode indicating whether the load operation requests same or different color components, or depth data; and based on the determined sampling rate, data storage format, and loading mode, load data from a multi-sample source into a register.