An accelerated screen codec technique is described that provides a general screen compression framework, which, in one embodiment, is Graphics Processor Unit (GPU) friendly. In one embodiment, in order to compress screen data, blocks in a compound screen image containing both images and text are segmented into text blocks and pictorial blocks using a simple gradient-based procedure. The text and pictorial blocks are then compressed respectively via different compression techniques. Additionally, a GPU acceleration architecture of one embodiment of the accelerated screen codec technique provides a screen codec that maximally exploits a GPU's high parallelism and reduces the download bandwidth from GPU to Computer Processing Unit (CPU).